Page 71 - Today’s Business Communication; A How-to Guide for the Modern Professional

60 TODAY’S BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

Mastering report writing starts with knowing your purpose and your
audience. To do otherwise imperils your good effort to a bad outcome.
Please refer to Chapter 3 for more on understanding your audience.
We’ve both worked inside and outside of higher education. Regardless
of the industries in which we’ve been employed, we wrote reports—lots of
them. And we were not alone. Bodell (2012), writing for Fast Company,
quoted a Boston Consulting Group study that indicated: “managers spend
40% of their time writing reports and 30% to 60% of it in coordinating
meetings.” Depending on your job title and function, you may write
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reports daily, weekly, monthly, or annually.
Regardless of the type of report you are writing, remember the three
alphabetical letters we discussed in Chapter 4: A, B, and C. Those letters
stand for accurate, brief, and clear. When your report is A, B, and C, your
reader may consume the important information easily. Business reports
cover an array of topics and have a plethora of objectives. Typical business
reports include the following, but please understand the list is far from
exhaustive:

• Annual reports
• Annual employment reviews
• Audit reports
• Budget requests
• Feasibility studies
• Government regulatory reports
• Compliance reports
• Sales reports
• Status updates

While Microsoft Word and other products offer templates for report
writing, we discourage their use. Likewise, we encourage you to avoid
downloading a free template from the Internet. We have nothing against
Microsoft, and we are fine with the Internet templates filling your inbox
with unsolicited advertising. Even so, we steer you away from templates
in general. Why? Because they tend to have a standard look to them, and
they are challenging for many users to manipulate because of built-in
auto-formatting.