How to make your report writing sing

For many, writing reports can be dull. Yet, as anyone who has been to business writing training can tell you, it does not always have to be like this.

Being able to make your reports stand out to your readers is a great skill to have. As such, here are two tips to help your reports sing louder than the rest:

1. Know your audience

In the same way a country singer would find it hard – or near impossible – to galvanise a crowd filled with heavy metal enthusiasts, a report must be shaped to its intended audience. Being able to adapt your business report to its viewers can allow for a much more effective communication process.

The key to this is understanding what drives the audience’s perceptions and making sure your reports engage with them. These can include:

• Age
• Sex and gender
• Ethnicity
• Intelligence
• Industry
• Organisational position

For instance, if your report will be read by your company’s board of directors, it would pay to speak mainly of facts and figures – leaving out the adjectives and digressions.

2. Raise your voice

In key parts of a song, the artist tends to raise their voice or give extra emphasis to lyrics – one reason for this is to tell the audience what they think is important. Reports are no different.

While you may think that your report is filled with insightful prose and self-explanatory numbers, many readers will not review the whole document. Unfortunately, this is the nature of the commercial world – as they say, time is money.

However, there are several actions you can take to ensure that the audience takes away what you believe is important. For one, you could add an executive summary at the start of the report in bullet form to emphasise that ‘this is important and you need to read it’.

Additionally, this can also turn a run of the mill report into an easily accessible reference document for company directors and other staff, while also raising your profile and advertising your work.

If you would like to know more about writing a killer report, talk to an experienced course provider today and find out how it can help you develop effective business writing skills.