WRITING AN EFFECTIVE

REPORT
There was a time when the
report was considered as the
most objective of all academic
papers, devoid of subjective
comments and opinions, and
believed to have no particular
bias.
 One needs only reports in
magazines such as The National
Geographic, The Economist, and
Time Magazine to discover that the
writers no longer write in the
restrictive third person point of
view, and instead they use the
more vigorous first person of point
of view, which uses the “I” or the
more formal “one” (as in “One
believes that”..)
I-reports is where normal
citizens are encouraged to use
their smart phones to record
natural calamities and current
events that mews agencies are
not able to cover.
Your report should have
conclusions, which give way to
insights about what you have
seen.
 The parts of the report are the
following: contextualization of the
report or the situation; the facts or
data; the description of the subjects
involved; and your conclusions about
it.
 One needs concrete data such as
statistics, observation of phenomena,
textual evidence, interviews and/or
surveys.
 Thebest reports have a combination
of qualitative and quantitative data.
Qualitative data is that which is not
anchored to numbers, but is
dependent on observation
(ethnography(, textual analysis,
and/or interviews. Quantitative data,
on the other hand, relies mainly on
numbers, such as statistics, surveys
and scientific experiments that use
numbers to prove their conclusions.
A report hopes to capture
the recognition of a
common experience by
using facts as its basis. It
endeavors to use a more
objective stance.
Reporting a
phenomenon is a
balancing act between
one’s experiences, as
found in objective facts,
and one’s interpretation
of these experiences.