I was given an assignment to write a story for a business magazine a couple of weeks ago about the topic of Intellectual Property Protection. It required background research on my part and I read several reports published by the federal government, several universities, business associations and community organizations. I even read published researched papers dealing with the topic. Some of the reports were very informative while others must have been written for someone who knows how to crunch numbers, or someone who is in charge of a pharmaceutical lab.
The point is reports get read by others than the original target. This is true particularly because they’re likely to be published somewhere on the Internet. They can serve many purposes that you may not be thinking about when you write the report such as background information for a magazine article or part of a promotional piece for a city’s website.
If you’re an entrepreneur, a major player in a business, a school administrator, or work for a non-profit organization or government agency, chances are excellent that you will be required to write reports about something related to your position.
Most business reports are intended for a variety of audiences. Even so it is important that you focus the report on your specific target otherwise it may be misdirected and not very effective. You need to know exactly what the readers of your report already knows and what they expect to learn from reading your report.
Also knowing the attitude of your readers before your write the report is important. For example, if you think that the readers may be not approve of the topic of your report, I suggest you give them more supporting evidence and documentation than you would if everyone was very amenable to your topic. Keep in mind the educational background and work experience of your reader before you start writing. A report for the board of directors will be different than a report for holders of common stock in terms of style, word usage, topics and complexity.
All those boring communication skills you learned in high school and freshman English may actually be useful when you write this report. It doesn’t matter if you’re an accountant, a public relations account manager, or a sales rep it is sometimes necessary to communicate in writing with sentences that contain more than 140 characters. Actually from my experience, the larger the company or the institution you work with, the more likely you’ll need to write written reports.
In my next post I’ll write about the format of your report and then detail the different parts to make your report writing that much easier. If you have any questions, now is the time to ask so that I can include them in my next couple of posts. It’s likely that others have those same questions so the answers are likely to benefit many. Asking the questions will be helpful to me especially if I weren’t planning to cover the topic in a post.
To your successful report writing,
Ruthan
Ruthan Brodsky
Business Writer & Content Creator
Health Writer
