Executive Summary for Report Writing Skills
Training Course

The aim of this book
Is to teach people, with various levels of experience, how to plan, write and present information as reports. The book includes a range of opportunities to practice and develop their skills. 

Excellent reports
An excellent report is a concise and accurate record of information that contains only the data relevant to the readership and record keeping process. It will be neatly laid out and easy to read with a simple  structure that allows easy access to the information.

Setting objectives
Before you start to write your report you need to work through a series of 8 questions and write a clear objective for the report. This should then be checked by the person who initiated the report.

Planning reports
Before you start to write the report you need to create a plan for the sections. The suggested technique is to separate this out into steps, so that you can think about what the information is and then organize it. You then need to gather all your source material together and advice is given on how to read a large amount of material.

Types of reports
There are three main types of report
1. Information
2. Research

3. Proposal
Each has different possible sections that could be included. All benefit from a title page, aim, executive summary and bibliography. In addition the components in the following table may be added. Some thought needs to be given as to whether all sections are necessary and what their order should be.Section headings should be meaningful to your audience, not just single words.

Executive summaries
A summary of the report can be included at the start, this should be no more than 5% of the report length. It should be in the same order as the report and should only include material that is in the main report. 

Organizing the report
To make things easy for people to remember, have white space, give no more than 4 ideas at once and people tend to remember start, ends and anything unusual.

Layout style
The recommended font style is sans serif (straight) and 12 point. People are advised to use the style formatting capabilities of their software as it makes both consistency of style and generation of contents pages  easier.There are also additional materials on grammar and diagrams on