Writing academic

reports
At some point in your academic or professional
career, you may be asked to write a report on a
specific topic. Academic reports are meant to provide
information or data about a very specific topic for a
particular audience (e.g. a report summarising data
obtained from a medical survey written for an
audience of doctors). Here, we’ll cover the steps
involved in writing academic reports to help you
create a well-written, polished report.

Determine the purpose of your report and its audience

Before you start writing, ensure that you know the desired purpose of the
report. This will help you make sure you only include information that is
relevant to the topic and that your audience will understand. If your
report is aimed at experts in the topic you’re writing about, you won’t
need to define common terms or provide extensive background
information on the topic. Conversely, if you’re writing for a lay audience,
you may need to provide some additional background information or
other explanatory materials that you wouldn’t normally need to include.

Conduct any necessary research

If you haven’t already conducted your research, determine what areas

you need to research and the best ways to go about that research based
on the purpose of your report. If you have already conducted your
experiment, survey, test, etc., you may still need to conduct some extra
research based on the goal and audience for your report to locate any
needed background information or other relevant data.

Break the report down into pieces

Most reports include specific sections, such as an introduction to the

report and your topic, sections describing the methods used in your work
and your results, a discussion of your results and a conclusion
summarising the content of the report and making recommendations
based on your results. Before you begin writing, it may help to create an
outline showing the necessary sections so you can organize your
thoughts and materials and determine which section to put your
information into. Such an outline can help immensely when you actually
start writing your report since you have a structure to work with.

Begin writing
Once you know the purpose and structure of your report and you have all
the information you need to include, it’s time to start writing. Ensure
that you present your information clearly and concisely using well-
written academic English [NOTE – link to academic English writing
article?], and make sure you use proper grammar, spelling and
punctuation [NOTE – link to grammar articles?]. Furthermore,
remember to organize your information clearly within the main sections;
it may help to include subheadings under your main section headings,
although including too many subheadings can become distracting to
readers.

Revise your work

Once you’re done writing, go back over your work to ensure that all the
information you’ve provided is accurate and presented clearly. Check for
errors in grammar, spelling, punctuation, sentence construction, etc.,
remembering that the spell check in your word processing program
won’t always catch every error. It may help to have a colleague or
someone else read over your report to note any lingering mistakes or to
point out places where the information provided is unclear or confusing.

Resources

Academic proofreading

Thesis proofreading

Dissertation proofreading service

Proofreading services

Copy-editing services