 Lecture 24, As-Salaamu Alaikum. Welcome to the virtual university's course on business and technical communication. In the last lecture, we looked at planning long reports and today we will look at writing long reports. In this lecture, we will describe how organizations produce formal reports and proposals. You will learn to prepare all necessary parts of a formal report. Also, you will learn how to select and prepare the visual aids to include in a formal report. We will also look at assembling all the parts of a formal report in the proper order and using the appropriate format. Let's have a look at report production. Planning formal reports and proposals conducting the necessary research, organizing the ideas, developing visual aids and drafting the text are all demanding and time consuming tasks and all of these go towards the production of a report. After careful editing and rewriting, you still need to produce a polished version and all these things will tie together to produce that final polished version of your report. How to produce your report also depends upon the equipment that you have available to you. Personal reports automatically handle many of the mechanical aspects of a report preparation. Be sure to schedule enough time to turn out a document that looks professional. If you keep all your time to writing the report and planning the report and writing the report and you don't keep give yourself enough time to edit or rewrite the report, then at the end when you have your deadline close by, you will be panicking and the final look of your report will not be professional enough. When you're composing a formal report, you need to keep in mind that a professional report conveys the impression that the subject is important. The three basic divisions of a formal report are the prefatory parts, the text and the supplementary parts. Let's have a look at each of these separately and see what they mean and what they include. The prefatory parts may be written after the text has been completed. Many of these parts include things like table of contents, list of illustration, synopsis, etc. And these are easier to prepare after the text has been written. Other parts can be completed at any time. Some of the parts of the prefatory text include the cover. Many companies have standard covers for reports made of heavy paper and imprinted with the company's name and logo. You need to put the title on the cover and the title should be informative but not too long. You don't want to intimidate your audience with a title that is too long, awkward and unwieldy, difficult to understand as well. Other things could be the title fly and title page. Title fly is a plain sheet with only the title of the report on it. The title report includes four blocks of information, the title of the report, the name, title and address of the person that authorised the report, the name, title and address of the person that prepared the report and the date on which the report was submitted. You also have the letter of authorisation and letter of acceptance. If you received a written letter of authorisation to prepare the report or proposal then you may want to include that in your report. Also remember that a letter of authorisation usually follows the direct request plan. So we looked at requests earlier and if there is a letter of authorisation it will follow a direct request plan where the person who has asked you to write the report will be following that plan and you will include that letter with your report. If you are writing a letter of acceptance then you will use a good news format, a good news letter format to accept that letter, to accept that authorisation and to say that yes you will indeed prepare that report and that also you may attach with the report if you feel necessary. Then there is a letter of transmittal which may be used if you are sending your report somewhere. This letter of transmittal conveys your report to your audience. You will use a less formal style for the letter of transmittal than the report itself. Generally, the letter of transmittal appears right before the table of contents. The letter of transmittal follows the same routine and good news plan as described in earlier lectures when we talked about good news plans. You will definitely have, if it is a long report, a table of contents which indicates an outline in the form of the coverage, the sequence and relative importance of the information in the report. Depending on where you have included specific information in the report and how that is listed in your table of contents that will highlight the importance of that particular piece of information as well. The table of contents is one piece, one prefatory part that is prepared after other parts of the report have been written or typed so that the beginning page number of each heading can be shown. Obviously, if you will write the table of contents first and then write the text later then you will not be able to put the page numbers in the table of contents. You will put the list of illustrations on a separate page if it doesn't fit on the same page as the list of table of contents. If you are using a list of figures and a list of tables separately and if they can't fit on one page then you can write them on separate pages. If you are dividing your illustrations in figures and tables then you will have two different lists and if you don't have two different lists on one page then you can write them on different pages but try to fit the list of tables and the list of figures on the same page. You will also have a synopsis or executive summary. A synopsis is a quick way to overview the report's important points and this is designed to give readers a quick preview of the contents. Because it's a concise representation of the whole it may be distributed separately to a wide audience. The synopsis can be attached to the report and it can also be given out to people independently without the report to generate interest in the report and then if they show interest and if there is a need to send the whole report to them then the report is sent out. The phrasing of the synopsis can be either informative or descriptive depending on whether the report has a direct or indirect order. An informative synopsis summarizes the main ideas whereas a descriptive synopsis describes what the report is about. For example an informative synopsis could be something like sales of super premium ice cream make up 11% of the total ice cream market and the descriptive synopsis for the same report could be this report contains information about super premium ice cream and its share of the market. You will use a descriptive synopsis for a skeptical audience and you will use an informative synopsis for other situations. If you feel that your audience is skeptical about what you are trying to say, then you will use a descriptive synopsis and you will not tell your findings in the beginning. But if you feel that your findings are easily accepted then you will use an informative synopsis and you will tell the information in the beginning. A synopsis or objective summary is a fully developed mini version of the report itself. Whatever is in your report it is intended for readers who lack time or motivation to read the complete report. A lot of the times you will be writing for people who are very busy and they will not have the time to read the whole report. So then they will read the executive summary and then if they feel that it is really important for them to read on then they will read the whole report or sometimes it might not be lack of time it might just be lack of motivation and even then your executive summary is then designed to help motivate the people to go on to read the whole report. So you will put enough information in a synopsis or executive summary so that an executive can make do without reading the complete text as well if they do not have the time or if you feel that they will not go on and read the whole report. Now coming to the text of the report you will need to make the decisions about the design and layout of the report and keep in mind that aids to understanding the text of the report include things like headings, visual aids and preview and summary statements. Headings are the most powerful format tool that are available to you. By skimming along from heading to heading the reader should be able to pick up the structure or outline of the report. And this process is easier if the headings are phrased and typed in a consistent way. Visual aids are also useful tools for calling attention to key points and helping readers grasp the flow of ideas. I catching graphics dramatize the high points of the message and informative captions explain their meaning. So make sure that you have graphics which are eye-catching which also are relevant obviously and then the captions that go with them are informative. It is also useful to preview summary points at the beginning of each major section or chapter and to sum them up at the end. Basically at the beginning of each section you need to tell the readers what you're going to tell them then in the middle sections you will tell them give them that information and at the end of that section you will tell the readers what you have told them. So in the beginning you tell them what will happen in the main text, a summary then you give them the main text and in the end you sum it up and recap the information in the entire section or chapter. The first part of your text is the introduction. The introduction to a report serves a number of important functions. It puts the report in a broader context by tying it to a problem or an assignment. It tells the reader the report's purpose. It previews the report's contents and organization and it establishes the tone of the report and the writer's relationship with the audience. The introduction deals with authorization. It talks of when, how and by whom was the report authorized, who wrote it and when it was submitted. All these aspects are covered in your introduction. It talks of the problem and the purpose which means the reason for the report's existence, what is to be accomplished as a result of the report being written, what is the purpose, what is the problem, why has the report been written basically. It also talks about the scope of the research that has been undertaken, what is and what isn't going to be covered in the report. The scope indicates the report size and complexity. What are the things that have been included in the report, what have been not done, what is the size of the report, what are the complex issues that have been covered. This is all its scope. And also the background, the historical events and conditions that have led up to the report. If a previous type of report has been written, and this report is being written as a result of the report, or some work has been done because of which it has been necessary to research and write the report, it will be mentioned in the background. You will also indicate the sources and methods that you have used. The secondary sources of information used and the primary sources such as interviews, surveys, experiments, observations. This will be highlighted as to what type of sources have been used in the report. And there will be a brief introduction of the definitions that have been used. A brief introductory statement leading into a column of terms used in the report and their definitions. It's important that if there are going to be any technical terms used then they need to be defined. So in your introduction you can have a little column which gives the definitions and obviously that column will be introduced by a sentence which says that these are the terms used and this is what they mean. You will also talk about the limitations of your research in your introduction. Factors indicating the quality of the report such as if the budget is too small to do all the work that should have been done, if there were time constraints and other events beyond your control that led to any limitations in the report, anything that was lacking in the report, then you will mention that. This is important because if you do not, then it seems that you were careless. But if you do mention it, whatever limitations you had, then you are letting the audience know that you are aware of these things, you have not overlooked them, but you have not been able to deal with them because of these factors. If you know that there are things that should have been covered in your report, it could not have been because the money was low, there was no time, there was no cooperation or whatever the factors are, then you should mention it yourself instead of being able to pick out the readers that these are the things that are missing in this report because it will feel that you have not completed your work. Also the report organization is referred to in the main introduction. The organization of the report along with the rationale for following that plan, how you have organized the report and why you have done it, what was the rationale for following that plan? You will also tell this in your introduction. After this you will come to the main body of the report. It consists of major sections or chapters that analyze, present and interpret the material that has been gathered as a result of your investigation. Whatever material you have gathered, you will present it in chapters, sections and in those chapters and sections, that material will be analyzed, presented and interpreted. One of the decisions to make when writing the body of your report is to decide how much detail you need to include. One of the major interesting things about writing reports is that generally when people are asked to write a long report and they are given a word limit in which to write that report, the first reaction they have is that this is too much and that this is too many words or too many pages and we will never be able to write so much. But then when they start actually researching and they get all the information material, then one of the major problems is that they don't know how to actually fit in all the information in the scope of the report. So then it turns the other way around. So you really need to decide what to include and what not to include because every report will have a limit and you do not want to include irrelevant information or information that will lead to the reader losing interest in your report. Another decision to make is whether you want to put the conclusion in the body or as a separate section or the third option could be that you could put the conclusion in both, you could have it in the main body and then have a separate concluding section as well. Final section of your report tells the reader what you have told them, basically the summary, conclusions and recommendations. In the summary you will state the key findings of your report, these will be paraphrased from the main body and stated or listed in the key order in which they appear in the body. In the conclusions, the writer will be presenting his or her analysis on the findings and what they mean. These are the answers to the questions that lead to the report in the first place. The third thing would be the recommendations. These are opinions of the writer based on reason and logic about the course of action that should be taken. If the report is organized in the direct order, the summary, conclusions and recommendations are presented before the body and are reviewed only briefly at the end. In action oriented reports, you will put all the recommendations in a separate section and spell out precisely what they mean. Now you will also have notes in your report. When you are writing the text of your report, you decide to acknowledge your sources. You will give credit where credit is due. Because if you don't, then it becomes plagiarism, then it becomes stealing people's ideas and putting them down as your own. If you have got any other information, then it is important to tell you where you got that information. Plagiarism basically occurs when one person misappropriates without permission any ideas or facts or words that were originated by others. So if there are any ideas, facts or words that were actually said by somebody else and you are using them without their permission and without referring to them or without giving them credit, then you are actually stealing what they have said. In general, you have flirted with plagiarism when your business documents fail to alert your audience that you have either repeated someone else's information word for word or paraphrased another's material too closely or lifted a series of phrases and put them together with your own words or borrowed a unique term that originated elsewhere. So then you are plagiarism. Basically, if you are using some other words word to word or paraphrasing someone else's material, but it is exactly the same meaning and you have just changed a few words from here to there. Or you have taken some phrases from here to there to a person's work, to a person's book, to a person's report, to different phrases, you have joined them and you have given them the impression that this is what you have written or there is a term or a concept that someone else originated and you are taking it in this way as it is yours. All these things come into plagiarism, cheating, stealing. Although your company may have more specific guidelines about plagiarism, how to avoid plagiarism, I am going to give you a few general tips on how to handle situations that commonly arise. If you are repeating information from another company document, that is something that can happen and that is plagiarism. If you reuse information appearing in another report, your audience may believe that you have independently verified material and eliminated any errors in the original report. So, if you have any information that has been written in a previous report and you are using it in your own report again, this audience will get the impression that maybe you have researched it. Otherwise, they will feel that it was in the first report and you have verified it and given them more information about it. That is why you are using it in your report. Or if you are using the same sources as another document, consulting somebody else's sources for further information is perfectly acceptable, but plagiarism deals with the way the information is reported, not whether you access the sources used by someone else. You should be aware of the ways that your colleague or someone else has used it. Not that the way they have used it, you should use it the same way, the exact ideas, the exact conclusions you should draw, then there will be no difference between what has been done in your work and what has been done before. It will only change the meaning of the words. So, this comes into plagiarism. Because you have taken all the ideas for them and you have written them in your words. Also, another commonly arising situation is when people repeat information that is protected by copyright. If you repeat information from books, published articles and other copyright materials, be sure to avoid infringing on the originators' legal rights. So, be careful to talk to your company's management before you repeat information that is protected by copyright. One approach, especially for internal reports, is simply to mention a source in the text. For example, according to Dr. Raftaab of Kangaram Hospital, hip replacement operations account for 7% of all surgery performed on women aged 65 and above. Now, this is perfectly acceptable. It's an internal report within the hospital, for example, or within an organization and then you can refer to a specific person who has found, who has done a research and found some results. But if your report is to be distributed to outsiders, you should include extra information on where you obtained the data. Then you will need to say, according to Dr. Raftaab of Kangaram Hospital, as stated in a conference on hip replacement, for example, or in the details of the conference, you will also need to give it to you. When you're using visual aids in your main body in the text, you face the problem of choosing the form. What form of visual aids to use, which best suits your message? Visual aids are a lot of things. Figures, graphs, tables, pictures. But which visual aids do you have to use, which are better highlighted depending on what you're writing about? Also, good business ethics, demand that you choose a form of visual aids that will not mislead your audience. Visual aids could be tables. When you have to present detailed specific information, you will choose a table, which is a systematic arrangement of data in rows and columns. You will use tables to help your audience understand detailed information. Although formal tables set apart from the text, information which is necessary for conveying complex information or data which is necessary for conveying complex information, some data can be presented more simply within the text. Data is such that it cannot be explained within the text, then you can explain it better in a formal table. Tabular information can be introduced within a text without a formal title. If it's information that you're using within the text, you don't really need to give a formal title. But if you're giving information in a more formal table form, then you'll have to give it a title as well. If you're only including one or two lines of information in a table text, then you don't need to give a formal title. The preceding or later text will explain it. Other visual aids could be line and surface charts. A line chart illustrates the trend over time and plots the interaction of two variables. You will basically use line charts to indicate change over time. A surface chart is a kind of a line chart with a cumulative effect. All the lines add up to the top line, which represents the total. And this form of chart is useful when you want to illustrate the changes in the composition of something over time. How something was composed? Another type of chart, a chart which is commonly used, is a bar chart. A bar chart is one in which amounts are visually portrayed by the height or length of rectangular bars. And bar charts are valuable when you want to compare the size of several items at once. You want to show changes in one item over time, over different years, or you want to indicate composition of several items over time, or show relevant sizes of a whole. of a whole. In a pie chart, numbers are represented as slices of a complete circle. Although they are less versatile, pie charts are nevertheless valuable as visual aids as well. When composing a pie chart, try to limit the number of slices to no more than 7. Other forms of visual aids are organization charts and flow charts. You will use organization charts to depict the interrelationship among the parts of an organization. You will use a flow chart to show a series of steps from beginning to end and also to show relationships. Once you have finished writing the text of your report, you will conclude it with a summary. And if appropriate, you will include a conclusion and recommendations. In a summary, you will recap the findings and explanations that have already been presented. You will place conclusions and recommendations in their order of logic or importance, preferably in list format. If you have any conclusions or recommendations, you will place them in the same order of logic. If you have any conclusions that you want to tell them later, you will place them later. The most important conclusions and main findings that you are looking for, you will tell them first. If you have any logical options, you will place them in the same order of logic. If you think that you will place them in the same order of logic, you will place them in the same order of logic. Preferably in list format, you will place them in the same order of logic. Also to induce action, to make sure that the readers do what you expect them to do and what you want them to do, you should explain in the recommendations section who should do what, where and how. If appropriate, also point out the benefits of the action to leave the readers with the motivation to follow on the recommendations. You will do it because they are beneficial for your company or maybe the people who follow the recommendations are beneficial for them. So clearly point out the benefits of following these recommendations so that the readers have the motivation to follow your recommended action. Now as we come to the end of this lecture on writing formal reports, I am going to show you some slides that will give you examples of some of the parts of a long report. Most of these are the prefatory parts that we've talked about earlier in this lecture. If you have any questions, you can email us and we will be happy to guide you according to how and where these parts can be used. Let's have a look first at the title page of a formal report. As you can see it has the main title which is not very long and it's captioned in a way that it's easy to read and easy to understand. Then it says who it was commissioned by and who it has been written by and the date. Alongside that is the letter of transmittal, the letter that goes along with the report when it is being sent somewhere and that is like a normal routine good news letter. The table of contents of formal reports will follow a pattern where you will write about the main sections, the main prefatory parts that come with the report, you will list the initial parts, the abstract, the table of contents, etc. And then you will talk about the main body and as you can see there are headings and there are subheadings and the page numbers are given alongside them. If there is a list of tables and figures that is to be included then that will list what page each figure appears on and what that figure is about. For example, if it is a figure showing the technical marketing process or whether it is the employment outlook for technical marketing, whatever it is that the figure is about or the table is about, you will give the name. It's not sufficient just to say table one figure, one figure, two figure, three, etc. Also make sure that whatever headings in the contents page or whatever captions for the tables and figures you are using in the list, they tally with what is within the main body. It is not that you have given a title in the list and actually you have given a title on the figure one. The initial paragraph talks about the main analysis in the report, the main findings and then it ends with a list of recommendations. Now this abstract is enough for anybody reading the report to know what the writer found and what needs to be done as a result of those findings. There can also be a partial glossary. We talked about defining terms earlier and this is what the glossary would look like. You take the technical terms and you define them. You can also have appendices to your report. Appendices are information material that is put separately attached separately to your report and it is not part of the main text or the main body of your report. In such a case if there are more than one or two appendices then you will also have a list of appendices. When you give your list of tables and figures then you will also have a list of appendices if they are worthy of being put in a list. Whatever appendices you have you will refer to them within your text so that they can be some relevance to having them in the text. Appendices will come at the very end of your report but they need to have a reference in your text. And also generally appendices are titled by appendix A, appendix B, etc. And if need be then there is a caption as well. If there are tables or articles whatever informational material that you feel is necessary but not so necessary that it has to come in the text. A lot of the times there is material that you writers feel the reader would benefit by reading but they don't want to include it in the main text because it breaks the flow. So then they just refer to the main finding of the material but they keep the main material as an appendix. In this lecture you learnt to basically look at the organization of formal reports, all the parts that are necessary for a formal report. And you also looked at the selecting and preparing the visual aids to support information that is given in a report. And we also talked about what type of visual aid to use for what particular type of information. For what type of information and for what type of visual aid we will use. We also looked at assembling all the different parts of a formal report in the proper order. And what type of format to use. We looked at the prefatory parts, the text, the concluding parts, how they would function together, how there would be references from one part to another if need be and what parts serve what purpose. If you have any questions please feel free to email us. The address is englishatvu.edu.pk. Until next time, Allah Hafiz.