The Report Outline is a new kind of outlining tool that will help you to:

• plan your project
• organize and write your report
• get feedback from your supervisor before you write your report

The Top-Down Approach:

The NEWS Comes First

Should your readers have to fight through all the information you've collected before they find out what you're trying to say?

If they should not, put your NEWS up front where they can get to it quickly and easily.

Most of us were taught to place conclusions at the end of a report, just as they came at the end of our research.

The danger in such an organization is that readers will miss the significance and lose interest and understanding long before they reach the conclusions.

Instead, you should put conclusions FIRST and then follow them by the evidence you have gathered that makes them convincing.

When you are planning a document, think of the old saying:

1. Tell them what you're going to tell them.
2. Tell them.
3. Tell them what you told them.

Instructions

When you write a Report Outline, you are essentially creating your own set of text and illustrations. This is a five-step process:

1. Brainstorm a set of questions the reader would ask about your project. Depending on the size of your project, this list may contain anywhere from a dozen to 50 or more questions.
2. Establish an order for the questions. Following the top-down approach, you should put the most important questions first.
3. Suborder questions if necessary. Some questions are really subquestions of others. At this stage, those subdivisions should be worked out.
4. Explain in brief phrases what information you intend to include to answer each question. At this stage, you are essentially writing a set of instructions to yourself. You do NOT need to include the information itself, only your approach to the question. See the sample for examples.
5. Indicate where you will use illustrations, tables, and graphs. Visual aids are extremely important in technical writing; don't ignore the possibilities. If you think about graphic possibilities at the Report Outline stage, you are far less likely to produce visual aids which are merely "stuck on" at the end of a report.

Advantages to the Report Outline

There are many advantages to using the Report Outline approach to planning rather than the standard formal outline:

• It helps to maintain your focus throughout the report.
• It helps you to keep your audience(s) in the forefront throughout the writing process.
• It focuses on the NEWS so that even readers who do not read the entire report see your conclusions.
• It makes it easier for either teams or individuals to work on a report. If the whole team agrees on a Report Outline, individual members can easily take pieces of the outline to write. You can also start the writing at any point - not necessarily at the beginning.
• The actual writing of the first draft becomes easier - like filling in the blanks.
• You can show a Report Outline to your supervisor for feedback BEFORE you invest in a rough draft that may miss the mark.
• You can tell where you are missing information when you write a Report Outline.

Related Web Sites

1. Beyond the Essay Form: A Checklist for Real-World Writing Tasks

2. Grading Criteria for Essays and Reseach Papers

3. Critical Thinking Questions You Can Ask About Anything

Main | Seminars | Teams | Thinking | Assessment | Map | Resources