Chapter Introduction
318
FOCUS ON PROCESS: Writing Informational Reports
Writing Directives
DOCUMENT ANALYSIS ACTIVITY: Report Presented as a Website and 
DOCUMENT ANALYSIS ACTIVITY: Informational Report Presented Through an Interactive Graphic and
Document Analysis Activity: Writing a Persuasive Directive
Writing Field Reports
GUIDELINES: Responding to Readers’ Questions in a Field Report
Writing Progress and Status Reports
ETHICS NOTE: Reporting Your Progress Honestly
ORGANIZING PROGRESS AND STATUS REPORTS
CONCLUDING PROGRESS AND STATUS REPORTS
GUIDELINES: Projecting an Appropriate Tone in a Progress or Status Report
Sample Progress Report
Writing Incident Reports
Writing Meeting Minutes
WRITER’S CHECKLIST
EXERCISES
CASE 12: Writing a Directive About Using Agendas for Meetings and
319
COMPLEX, EXPENSIVE PROJECTS call for a lot of documents. Before a project begins, a vendor might write a proposal to interest prospective clients in its work. After a project is completed, an organization might write a completion report to document the project or a recommendation report to argue for a future course of action. In between, many people will write various informational reports.
For more about analyzing an audience from another culture, see “Communicating Across Cultures” in Ch. 4.
Whether they are presented as memos, emails, reports, or web pages, informational reports share one goal: to describe something that has happened or is happening now. Their main purpose is to provide clear, accurate, specific information to an audience. Sometimes, informational reports also analyze the situation. An analysis is an explanation of why something happened or how it happened. For instance, in an incident report about an accident on the job, the writer might speculate about how and why the accident occurred.
| FOCUS ON PROCESS: Writing Informational Reports | |
|
In writing informational reports, pay special attention to these steps in the writing process. |
|
| PLANNING | In some cases, determining your audience and to whom to address the report is difficult. Choosing the appropriate format for your report can also be difficult. Consider whether your organization has a preferred format for reports and whether your report will be read by readers from other cultures who might expect a formal style and application. See Chapter 4 for more about analyzing your audience. |
| DRAFTING | Some informational reports are drafted on site. For instance, an engineer might use a tablet computer to “draft” a report as she walks around a site. For routine reports, you can sometimes use sections of previous reports or boilerplate. In a status report, for instance, you can copy the description of your current project from the previous report and then update it as necessary. See “Your Ethical and Legal Obligations” in Ch. 2 for more about boilerplate. |
| REVISING | Informal does not mean careless. Revise, edit, and proofread. Even informal reports should be free of errors. |
| EDITING | |
| PROOFREADING | |
320
This chapter discusses five kinds of informational reports:
A supervisor writes a directive explaining a company’s new policy on recycling and describing informational sessions that the company will offer to help employees understand how to implement the policy.
An insurance adjuster writes a field report presenting the results of his inspection of a building after a storm caused extensive damage.
A research team writes a progress report explaining what the team has accomplished in the first half of the project, speculating on whether it will finish on time and within budget, and describing how it has responded to unexpected problems.
A worker at a manufacturing company writes an incident report after a toxic-chemical spill.
A recording secretary writes a set of meeting minutes that will become the official record of what occurred at a meeting of the management team of a government agency.
Another type of informational report is the recommendation report (see Chapter 13).