Advanced Report Writing and Communication Skills
This training course is designed to enable participants to develop the key skills required to deliver reports for specific purposes that achieve results.
Description
This workshop is intended to help you do the writing your job demands. If you are a manager at any level in business, government, or industry, you must write reports.
Whether you want to or not, you write to explain things, to smooth relationships and to convince others of the value of some course of action. Writing must be clear, concise, complete, and correct. It must also convey your message in a courteous tone.
The workshop will help you to identify the range of this kind of writing, the forms it takes, and the persuasive techniques it requires.When you have completed this course you will be able to define the key concepts associated with Advanced Report Writing and you will be able to: Identify the main obstacles to effective Report Writing and how to avoid them; Understand the nature of a Technical Report and Project Report; Write from the perspective of the writer and the reader.
Course Objectives
By the end of this training course, participants will be able to:
- To learn the value of good written communications
- Understand how to write with clarity, brevity and a modern, professional voice
- Communicate complex information, ideas, decisions and arguments to a variety of readers, using clear english
- Write well-structured documents that get the message across quickly, clearly and effectively
- To prepare reports and proposals that inform, persuade, and provide information
- To learn how to proofread your work so you are confident it is clear, concise, complete, and correct
- Identify and avoid common errors of grammar, sentence structure, vocabulary and punctuation
- Improve the presentation of a report
- Have the skills to edit and proofread your own and others’ written work
Who is this Training Course for?
All individuals with responsibilities requiring extensive report writing.
- This in-depth look at how to create readable reports is for anyone who wants to write with greater speed, ease and confidence
- It is ideal for people who want to take their report writing to the next level – but is equally valuable for those with new responsibilities for report writing
- It is designed to support anyone who feels that the ability to write successful reports could help them in their career
How will this Training Course be Presented?
This course uses a variety of learning tools including writing activities, story-boarding, controlled experiments and videos. The course also provides participants with complex situations which require written interventions.
The Course Content
Topics to be covered:
- Define the key issues to be covered and the ‘question’ being asked
- Communication objectives – precise objectives for what we want the readers to know, feel and do
- Develop a research strategy
- Research methods: Primary and secondary
- Report types and structures
- Principles of plain English
- Principles of page layout and document design
- The role of supporting elements such as the executive summary and follow up
- Structure the argument effectively
- Use a style of plain English that improves understanding and raises levels of interest
- Produce an effective and attractive layout
- Package the report with an interesting title, executive summary, contents page
- Compile reports ensuring content and format are appropriate.
- Discuss the focus of the report - deciding on correct content.
- Meeting reporting deadlines.
- How to select, format, structure and layout reports: including headings, bullets and numbering.
- Ensure the document sequence is logical and meaningful.
- How to present information differently: text, graphs, tables, flow charts and diagrams.
- Organising and structuring a technical text appropriately.
- Presenting the same information in different ways.
- Technical reports
- General reports
- Report checklists
- Topic or subject matter
- Purpose of the report
- Scope of the report
- Section identification systems
- Referencing
- Table of contents
- Stages of report production
- Checklist for editing our work
- Appendix: homophones and parts of speech