Report writing.
Tags: career, writing, tutorial, beginners
Published: 2023-03-20 03:15:25

Most academic disciplines ask or require students to write reports and students are often confused with what that really means.
Likewise in business, confronted with a request to write a **report** to a senior manager, many people struggle to know what to write.
Confusion often arises about the writing style, what to include, the language to use and other factors.
This article aims to tackle some of these elements and provide guidelines on how to write a good report. 
**What is report**
A report is a document that presents information in an organized format for a specific audience and purpose. It is written after the completion of a task in different fields which aims to
Convey information, analyze an issue or problem, and provide a recommended course of action. They present factual based information for a specified audience. 
There are many types of Reports and the format or style of writing these reports may differ depending on the institution, field concern or even the professor.  
As earlier said reports are of many types but for this article we would be looking at academic reports. 
**What is an academic report**
An academic report aims to sell a product, idea or point of view (Van Emden and Easteal, 1995).It should inform, explain and persuade (Williams, 1995) by using well organized research.
These kind of reports are also used to present and discuss the results of an experiment, survey or other research methods.
**Format of an academic report.**
An academic report is often characterized by its layout presented in form of sections. These sections are;
**Introduction**
**Literature Review**
**Methods**
**Results**
**Discussions**
**Conclusions**
Now let's look at each section in details to find out what each section should contain and in what order.
**1. Introduction**
Here you present the research topic or question(problem statement)and explain why you chose to study that topic(rationale). You may also present a general overview of the work you did and your findings, expanding on these points further in the main body of the text.
**2. Literature review**
Here you briefly summarize work on this topic other researchers have conducted, including their findings. You can also provide any background information on the topic that your readers should have before you present your own work. Remember your readers are interested in your work, not the work of others. Focus on summarizing work that relates in some way to the work you have performed.
**3. Methods**
Here you describe the steps you took in your research, for example, you can describe the methodology you used to build your study, the sampling method you used to obtain survey participants and the steps you took in a scientific experiment. Make sure everything is written in past tense as you are describing something that has already been carried out. 
**4. Results**
This sections is meant to describe your findings, for example you can provide information such as survey participant's answers, medical test results, data from scientific experiment and any statistical analysis results. You may find it useful to use figures and tables to represent these results in a easy-to-read format
**5. Discussions**
You will discuss the implications of your findings, explaining them and relating them to the previous research presented in your literature review. You will interpret your findings and describe how these findings answer (or don't answer) your research questions. You should also describe any limitation of your work such as sample size, missing values and discuss how you could solve these issues in your next research.
**6. Conclusion**
This is where you summarize your main work and findings as well as the implications of your works. You should not introduce any new material in this section. You should also provide recommendations based on your findings and discuss any future research needed.
Those are the various sections a report is to have but these may differ depending on the institution or professor supervising as earlier stated, that's why it's always advisable to check and verify clearly what's expected of you. Furthermore, reports are not based on personal ideas or opinions but are informative and fact based.