17 Writing a Business Report

Report purpose

When you write a business report, you’re generally required to define a situation or problem, analyse it, and make recommendations based on your analysis.

The reader of your report is looking for a clear account of the situation or problem, a thorough analysis of it, and sensible recommendations. In the professional world, such as in business or accounting, someone will be relying on your report to inform their financial decisions, e.g. whether to invest in a particular company, or whether to spend money on a particular project.
In the research world, e.g. in science or engineering, your report on an experiment or research project will be crucial for informing future research or setting the framework for designing something that people will actually use.

With this in mind, your report must be^[1]:

• clear and easy to understand
• concise
• well organised
• accurate
• thorough in its analysis
• logical

Report structure

A report’s structure is introduction, body, and conclusion.

A more extensive business report may include extra elements such as a title page, table of contents, glossary, executive summary, recommendations, or appendices. The following table shows the possible elements of a report in the order they would usually occur.
The essential elements (introduction, body, conclusion, and reference list) are shown in red and bold in the table below. The other elements are optional.
Always check what is required in a report or if a template has been provided, as different people have different expectations^[2].

Formatting

A report should be as easy to read as possible, so you need to take some care with how you present it on the page. Follow any formatting guidelines given and also keep the following points in mind:

• Keep section headings short and informative
• Make sure section headings stand out so the reader can easily skim the report to find the information they most want to know
• Leave at least one line of white space between sections and elements
• Number all the pages

Report tone

As with an essay, a report is a formal piece of academic or professional writing. It should be formal, impersonal, technical, and abstract. However, because a report often has practical outcomes in terms of decisions the reader might make, certain sections may use more concrete language.

If the report is about your experience during a practical unit or similar, it will be more personal, but it should still remain formal, technical, and reasonably abstract^[3].

Formal

Being formal doesn’t necessarily mean being complicated or hard to read, but you do need to take care with your word choice and expression. Because a report is often written with a professional audience in mind (even in an academic setting), you need to make it sound professional.

To make your language sound as formal as possible, you should avoid using language features that are characteristic of spoken casual conversation, such as:

• colloquial or slang words (e.g. use ‘children’ instead of ‘kids’)
• contractions (e.g. use ‘is not’ instead of ‘isn’t’)
• abbreviations (e.g. use the word ‘maximum’ instead of ‘max’)
• spoken-like grammatical structures such as run-on sentences or sentence fragments

Impersonal

Your report is all about the information, not about you. Your reader just wants to know what the situation is, how they should think about it, and what they should do about it. Even your analysis of the situation/problem and your recommendations need to be presented in impersonal terms.

Technical

You’re writing your report about a specific topic in a specific academic discipline, and/or for a professional audience familiar with the concepts of the industry. So you should use technical terms associated with that topic and that discipline. This shows that you’re developing an understanding of the special categories and terminology used in your discipline and industry. It also helps you to communicate more precisely about the particular discipline-specific concepts that are important in your treatment of the issues.

Abstract

Your report may be about real-world problems, but most of it should be expressed in conceptual terms. The recommendations section is where it might get a bit more concrete, as you apply your analysis to suggest future actions. The nouns you use should mostly be abstract nouns: qualities and concepts, things that you can’t see or touch, e.g. sustainability, economic growth, pollution, anxiety, and design. Many of these are related to verbs (e.g. growth comes from the verb ‘grow’, ‘pollution’ comes from the verb ‘pollute’).

The 3-part Writing Process

The writing process can be loosely defined as the stages a writer goes through in order to complete a written task. The idea of teaching writing as a process, not a product, was coined by Donald M. Murray in the early 1970s, and revolutionized the way that writing was taught. Since then, the focus has come to be even more on the recursive process of writing, where each stage can be visited multiple times and can often lead back to the previous stage. We have categorized the process into three parts, with levels of headings and subheadings, but in reality the process is one of blurred steps, not distinct ones. Authors often move between stages in fits-and-starts, then return to earlier stages as an idea becomes better refined and clearer. And yet, writing is a deeply personal process, and one for which there is no correct formula. What we have constructed below is a guide, not a formula, for approaching the writing process, which should be tailored to fit your needs and style.

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