What Special care should be taken while preparing a report?

Things to consider when writing a report

·    Be clear, informative, and concise. Use tables and easy to understand, graphs to explain numbers.

·    Address your report to the reader. Use terminology which is easy to understand for the reader. This often requires learning something about the field.

·    Don’t use unnecessary statistical jargon.

·    Explain what you now know or have discovered about the problem, with very little emphasis on how you got there. The reader rarely needs to know the step by step process.

·    Give practical information of the results in language the reader should find understandable.

·    Include summary tables and plots in the body of the text

·    Label all figures and tables so it is virtually understandable when viewed alone

·    Practice, practice, practice on preparing neat, effective reports. Use a word processor that helps with spelling and to a lesser degree grammar.

Report Organization - Certainly not the only style to use but very common

·    Summary: Should state the problem and describe what was found through analysis in a very concise manner. In a sense it should be a synopsis of the report. Rarely should it contain any figures. May have one summary table.

·    Key graphs: Should be self-contained.

·    Introduction: This should state the problem similar to the summary but with far more background information. It is also a place where you, might indicate what analytic approach to the problem you will be taking. This section should end with some sort of description about each section in the report.

·    Materials and Methods/Design of Experiments: This may turn out to be more than one section. In this part, you identify the key aspects of the experiment heeded to understand the design. Some elaboration may be needed to explain issues such as sub sampling and repeated measures but you want to try to keep it brief. This section should address the experimental units, blocking, randomization, and how the measurements were taken.

·    Analysis: This section should clearly speak to the reader. Avoid phrases like “it is clear that” or “obviously, ....”. Write in enough depth so the reader can understand what was done but save the nitty gritty details for the appendix. Figures and/or tables used in this section should be self contained. You should state what you found and how you found it but you should not go through the entire analysis path you used to come to these results.

·    Conclusions: Although interpretation should appear throughout the document, many people tend to read the summary and conclusions first, glancing at figures and tables. Thus, it is very important to put effort into this section. You should not only rehash the results in a more concise fashion but you also want to refer back to the questions posed by the client and time them to the results. Since the conclusion section looks back over the experiment, it can also serve as a springboard for recommending future investigations to answer any remaining questions. Remember to consider the cost and time required to collect new data should you think recommend this.