Defining a Specific Purpose

Your purpose is your reason for writing. The purpose of a report is to inform; as the writer, you are tasked with providing information and explaining it to readers. Many topics are suitable for informative writing—how to find a job, the way a disease spreads within a population, or the items on which people spend the most money. Some textbooks are examples of informative writing, as is much of the reporting you find on reputable news sites.

An analytical report is a type of report. Its purpose is to present and analyze information. An assignment for an analytical report will likely include words such as analyze, compare, contrast, cause, and/or discuss, indicating the specific purpose of the report.

Tuning In to Audience Expectations

The audience for your report consists of the people who will read it or who could read it. Are you writing for your instructor? For your classmates? For other students and teachers in professional fields or academic disciplines? For people in your community? Whoever your readers are, they expect you to do the following:

• Have an idea of what they already know about your topic, and adjust your writing as needed. If readers are new to the topic, they expect you to provide the necessary background information. If they are knowledgeable about the topic, they will expect you to cover the background quickly.
• Provide reliable information in the form of specific facts, statistics, and examples. Whether you present your own research or information from other sources, readers expect you to have done your homework in order to supply trustworthy information.
• Define terms, especially if audience members may be unfamiliar with your topic.
• Structure your report logically. It should open with an introduction that tells readers about the subject and follows a logical structure.
• Adopt an objective stance and neutral tone, free of bias, personal feelings, or emotional language. By demonstrating objectivity, you show respect for your readers’ knowledge and intelligence and build credibility and trust, or ethos, with them.
• Present and cite source information fairly and accurately.

Informal Reports

An informal analytical report will identify a problem, provide factual information about it, and draw conclusions about the information. It is usually structured like an essay, with an introduction or summary, body paragraphs, and a conclusion or recommendations. It will likely feature headings identifying key sections and be presented in academic essay format, such as MLA Documentation and Format or APA Documentation and Format. 

Other types of informal reports include journalism reports. A traditional journalism report involves a reporter for a news organization reporting on the day’s events—the results of an election, a political crisis, a plane crash, a celebrity marriage—on TV, on radio, or in print. An investigative journalism report, on the other hand, involves reporters doing original research over a period of weeks or months to uncover significant new information, similar to what Barbara Ehrenreich did for her book Nickel and Dimed. For sample traditional and investigative journalistic reports, visit the website of a reliable news organization or publication, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the New Yorker, or the Atlantic.

Formal Reports

Writers in the social sciences, the natural sciences, technical fields, and business often write formal analytical reports, including lab reports, research reports, and proposals.

Formal reports present findings and data drawn from experiments, surveys, and research and often end with a conclusion based on an analysis of these findings and data. These reports frequently include visuals such as graphs, bar charts, pie charts, photographs, or diagrams that are captioned and referred to in the text. Formal reports always cite sources of information, often using APA Documentation and Format, used in the examples in this chapter, or a similar style.

If you are assigned a formal report in a class, follow the instructions carefully. Your instructor will likely explain the assignment in detail and provide explicit directions and guidelines for the research you will need to do (including any permission required by your college or university if you conduct research on human subjects), how to organize the information you gather, and how to write and format your report. A formal report is a complex, highly organized, and often lengthy document with a specified format and sections usually marked by headings.

The following are the components of a formal analytical report. Depending on the assignment and the audience, a formal report you write may include some or all of these parts. For example, a research report following APA format usually includes a title page, an abstract, headings for components of the body of the report (methods, results, discussion), and a references page. Detailed APA guidelines are available online, including at the Purdue University Online Writing Lab.

Exploring the Genre

The following are key terms and characteristics related to reports.

• Audience: Readers of a report or any piece of writing.
• Bias: A preconceived opinion about something, such as a subject, an idea, a person, or a group of people. As a reader, be attentive to potential bias in sources; as a writer, be attentive to your own biases.
• Body: The main part of a report is between the introduction and the conclusion. The body of an analytical report consists of paragraphs in which the writer presents and analyzes key information.
• Citation of sources: References in the written text to sources that a writer has used in a report.
• Conclusion and/or recommendation: The last part of a report. In this section, the writer summarizes the significance of the information in the report or offers recommendations—or both.
• Critical thinking: The ability to look beneath the surface of words and images to analyze, interpret, and evaluate them.
• Ethos: The sense that the writer or other authority is trustworthy and credible; also known as ethical appeal.
• Evidence: Statements of fact, statistics, examples, and expert opinions that support the writer’s points.
• Facts: Statements whose truth can be proved or verified and that serve as evidence in a report.
• Introduction: The first section of a report after any front matter, such as an abstract or table of contents. In an analytical report, the writer introduces the topic to be addressed and often presents the thesis at the end of the introduction.
• Logos: The use of facts as evidence to appeal to an audience’s logical and rational thinking, also known as logical appeal.
• Objective stance: Writing that is free from bias, personal feelings, and emotional language. An objective stance is especially important in report writing.
• Purpose: The reason for writing. The purpose of an analytical report is to examine a subject or issue closely, often from multiple perspectives, by looking at causes and effects, by comparing and contrasting, or by examining problems and proposing solutions.
• Statistics: Factual statements that include numbers and often serve as evidence in a report.
• Synthesis: Making connections among and combining ideas, facts, statistics, and other information.
• Thesis: The central or main idea that you will convey in your report. The thesis is often referred to as the central claim in argumentative writing.
• Thesis statement: A declarative sentence (sometimes two) that states the topic, the angle you are taking, and the aspects of the topic you will cover. For a report, a thesis indicates and limits the scope of the report.