Writing Effective Reports

You will learn to:

• Plan your reports to target your readers and achieve your objectives
• Produce convincing recommendation reports that are:
• Easy to read
• Easy to understand
• Easy to act upon
• Use the pyramid structure of reports to appeal to differing groups of readers
• Improve understanding of your documents by structuring information in a way helpful to your readers
• Increase your confidence in delivering a successful reports that enables the business to make a meaningful decision
• Become a more powerful and persuasive report writer

Presenting information in an effective report is an essential tool for managing your business efficiently. Few of us have been taught how to write good report; it's simply assumed that we can do it. Yet we've all read enough badly written reports to know it isn't that simple.

This course teaches you how to produce reader-focused, comprehensible and persuasive documents. For you as an individual report writing is a career skill that can make a huge difference to how you are perceived within your business. For your business clear written communications are key to sensible decision-making.

This course is structured so that your own templates can be integrated into the course flow and the course can be customised to your exact business needs.

This course is valuable for anyone who wants to improve their report writing skills. It is particularly appropriate for managers at all levels, management-track professionals and employees who have to prepare reports on a regular basis.

The course exercises focus on issues specific to creating reports. We can customise the course exercises so that they deal with problems you have identified in your business. Standard course exercises include:

• Analysing and prioritising the audiences for your report
• Selecting and implementing an idea generation technique
• Developing criteria and explaining alternatives to form the recommendation section of a report
• Developing a reader-focused structure for report information
• Signalling with sentences to get your message across to the reader
• Writing a great Executive Summary
• Using checklists to focus your revision process
• Writing a short report

Included with the course are checklists and roadmaps to focus each stage of the process plus a CD containing course exercise materials, checklists and roadmaps for use in the workplace.

We provide a report template to demonstrate the design and structure best practice taught in the course. The template includes macros, toolbars, boilerplate text examples, and built-in styles to accelerate report production.

Writing Effective Reports is a two-day course.

This course costs £800 per attendee. If you are interested in running the course onsite for your company we have attractive discounts for more than two attendees.