Reader-Friendly Reports: A No-nonsense Guide to Effective Writing for MBAs, Consultants, and Other Professionals

UNDERSTANDING THE ASSIGNMENT

Before starting to answer the question, you’ve got to know what the question is. A sizable portion of business writing troubles can be traced to a failure to identify the assignment correctly. For example, although asked what to do about a problem, an incompetent report writer might waste the entire report telling instead how the problem occurred, which isn’t the same thing at all. As a result, the reader has to suffer through the whole tedious report without ever finding out the answer to the question. Likewise if the boss asks a supervisor to recommend for or against promotion of an employee, but the supervisor instead spends the whole report recounting the employee’s work history and never gets around to the yes-or-no ...