Business Style report

ILLUSTRATED BUSINESS-STYLE REPORT assignment grading criteria

Here’s a description of your first major writing in the course. In this description, I’m using the reader-friendly layout required for documents in this course, including this first report. Below, you’ll see a standard memo/email heading, brief introduction, and a list of the main sections headings I’ll use in this document. For easy visual navigation of the report, section headings will match this list (aka blueprint) exactly. 

The reader-friendly structure below is the one you saw last week in the sample report you critiqued and the one you'll be using this week as you compose the introduction to your own report.

 

To: Members of Writing in the Workplace class

From: Melanie Schultz, instructor

Date: May 21, 2018

Subject: Description of the kind of report due at the end of Week 3

 

During the many years that I’ve taught this course, I’ve answered hundreds of questions about assignments. In my latest attempt to describe this report writing assignment clearly, here’s what I’ll cover:

· Topic

· Audience

· Academic Honesty

· Length and depth

· Use of evidence

· Layout

Topic

Your topic for your report is a concept (an idea or a term) that you understand well but that is probably unfamiliar to most other members of the class. Choose a topic from your field of study, from a job, or from your personal interests.

You should be enough of an expert to make research unnecessary. However, if you do choose to add information from outside your personal experience, it should take up not more than 10% of your document. All words, ideas, or organization of material not your own must be scrupulously documented in MLA or APA style.

However, most important to the kind of informal, reader-friendly documentation required in this course is that you mention the name of the person or organization that originated the information and the title of the document beforeyou use it. Canvas automatically submits drafts of writings in this course to Turnitin for a color-coded report on words and phrases that are not original to you, so please take care to submit only your own, original writing.

Recent successful topics in this course include Avalanche transceivers, How to become a Project Management professional, Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), An explanation of the term “Metadata,” The parenting strategy “Magic 1-2-3,” and What a Litigation Auditor Does. Others we’ve seen recently are on How to install anti-virus protection, How to choose a mattress, and Jazzercise.

Any topic you can explain well should work well. You'll use this same topic for your Weeks 5-6 slide set.

Audience

Your audience for your report is this class--real people. Please address us in the "To:" section of your memo heading and design your content to meet our needs and interests. Remember that we are intelligent readers who are not necessarily specialists in your field. We will need to be spoken to in Plain English, not in the technical language of your academic major or your career field!

Here’s a little more about how to write in Plain English:  http://centerforplainlanguage.org/5-steps-to-plain-language/ (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

Academic Honesty

All writing in this course must follow the guidelines expressed in the second section of Champlain's CPS division's Academic Honesty policy. The full policy is available to you in our Course Overview Module. I've copied the most relevant wording below: 

INSTRUCTOR’S INTENDED PURPOSE

The student’s work must match the instructor’s intended purpose for an assignment.

Students may not submit a paper or assignment written for one course in another course without permission of the instructor. Work that is reused without the consent of the instructor will be considered a violation of the Academic Honesty Policy, even if that work was authored by the student.

In brief,

· as an instructor, my "intended purpose" for this assignment is that you explain a technical concept with which you are very familiar to members of this class outside your field. Our class is a general audience similar to the clients and customers you may encounter in your workplace. 

· reports written previously in another course, or in your workplace, for other audiences and for other purposes, may not be reused in this assignment without my permission.

Length and depth

The length and depth of your report depend on your assessment of what we in this class need to know in order to understand and possibly apply the information you give us. The length and depth of reports written in the workplace are determined by what their actual readers—real people—need to know. 

Generally, experts recommend focusing workplace readers on two to five main points (main section headings). Focus your energy on making your information interesting and useful to the “general public”—those of us in this class who are not well-informed in your career field or with your special interests.

In short, this report is not a test of how much you know (as it might be in another kind of course); this report is, ideally, a clear and readable explanation of material your readers do not know as well as you do! 

Evidence

In each of your body paragraphs, support the point you are making by using appropriate brief examples, narrative examples, or comparisons that your target audience will understand and appreciate. That is, support all generalizations with concrete details, examples, and stories. Choose the concrete support that you believe your general readers can relate to.

Here’s a structure I’ve seen recommended for each paragraph in the body of your report:

· Make a point (express an opinion, convey an idea)

· Support the point (offer facts, examples, image/illustration, or stories from your experience)

· Relate your support/evidence to the point and move to your next point

Here’s a very simple diagram that some of you may have encountered before. It makes the point that for every general remark a writer makes, readers will need some concrete details to really “see” (and believe) what the writer is saying:

Of course, in the real world of the workplace, you may need only one example, story, or comparison to support your main point in each paragraph, but do keep paragraphs relatively short and provide concrete details for almost every general remark you make. If you can’t support a statement with evidence of some sort, omit it from your report!

Layout

Your report requires a memo format: To, From, Date, Subject.

Sign your report. To gain credibility for your explanation, add your credentials beneath your name: Computer Forensics and Digital Investigations Major, Credit Union Loan Officer, Parent of Three, etc.

Your report also requires the kind of illustration that visually clarifies your explanation and saves words. Merely decorative photos or clip art are not appropriate in a business-style report.

Be sure to explicitly introduce your illustration, telling us why you're showing it to us at this time and what part(s) you want us to look at closely. Then, follow up on your illustration by applying it to a specific example/situation.

Here’s a link to information about three features of effective workplace writing

  http://www.edbailey.org/pageslayout/pages/homelayout.htm (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. :

· Paragraphs (short),

· Headings (bold and introduced in your opening), and

· Bullets (frequent).

 

Overall, please think of this first major writing as an opportunity to talk about, and organize visually, some information that you personally have—and that others in class might profit from knowing. Select your information with us, your readers, in mind, and present it in the clearest, most concise, and most interesting way you know how. In our revision and editing discussions, we’ll help you meet these goals!

Achieving visual and intellectual clarity in writing

The fundamental goal of ENGL 315, Writing in the Workplace, is to help you achieve visual and intellectual clarity in your writing through a simple technique—introduce your information before conveying it. Then, follow up.

Here’s are a few examples:

· When writing or speaking to people who don't know you and/or your areas of expertise, reveal your credentials on the topic before you begin.

· When writing an email or report, follow a brief introduction of your topic with a list of

· the two to five points you’ll make or

· the two to five parts into which you’ve divided your message.

· When using information from somewhere other than your own mind (aka writing from research), reveal the title of the source and its author before using the information.

· Likewise, when introducing an illustration to support a point you’re making, reveal

· its source and

· why you’re using it at that moment.

Before, or right after, you use material from a source outside yourself, let your readers know why you’re using it—relate it clearly to the point you’re making. Likewise, follow up on an illustration by “talking your readers/audience through” its parts, giving them examples of how each part of the illustration supports the point you’re making in that section of your document.

To support the techniques described above, use these visual features:

· Bullets to distinguish the parts of your document: For clarity, write these bulleted items in parallel grammatical structures—all noun or noun phrases, all verb phrases, or all adjective phrases, for example. (I’ve written the lists in this document in “parallel” grammatical structures.)

· Bold headings for the main parts of a document: These headings should match, word for word, the list of the main points you’ve said you’d discuss.

· Labels for illustrations: For ease of reference, consider labeling your illustrations—Figure 1, Figure 2, etc.—throughout your document.

Revising your writing for correctness and clarity

Before expanding your introduction to your report this week, please review the criteria for your final draft of your illustrated, business-style report. You'll find it at the top of our Week 2 Module.

I hope that you are noticing the cumulative nature of this course. As you work this week on a revision of your illustrated email report explaining a concept, think about how to use all of the advice the course has offered you so far.

Here's the blueprint for this document:

· Use Plain Language

· Use a spelling and grammar checker to check your own and others' drafts

· Make your writing clear and memorable by supporting opinions with concrete examples

· Make nouns and pronouns "agree" as a matter of grammatical logic 

· Check your facts

Use  Plain Language

· Step 2: Present readers with a blueprint for your report 

· Step 2 and Step 4: Design an inviting and easy-to-read layout 

· Step 3: Present your main point in your subject line and first paragraph

Use a spelling and grammar checker to check your own and others' drafts

· Use the most appropriate punctuation possible to express your ideas 

· Use information about readability

· average words per sentence around 17

· a percentage of passive voice below 10

If you still need to set up your computer, here's the link to  directions for setting up your computer  to report to you on a document's spelling, grammar, and style. These are the directions we used in Week 1. 

To copy readability statistics into a document, follow this link:  here's how .

Make your writing clear and memorable by supporting opinions with concrete examples

Using the kinds of specific examples that good writers advocate can improve all kinds of writing and most oral communication as well. Go a little further and incorporate an illustration, and you'll interest as well as inform your readers.

Make nouns and pronouns "agree," a matter of grammatical logic

One grammatical issue is increasingly an issue only for very careful writers and editors. However, I'd like you to know that it exists so that you can make an informed decision about whether or not you'll worry about it in your business and professional writing. As you revise and edit with your team and with the class as a whole this week, you will need to practice this grammatical distinction between singular and plural.

Here's a classic example: "When driving, everyone should signal before they change lanes."

What's wrong with this statement? Grammatically, words such as everyone and everybody are singular. (The words one and body are clearly singular; it's the attached word every that gets us to thinking "plural"!)

Yes, most of us think of everyone in the statement above as meaning "all drivers." That's what we want the word to mean when we choose it. However, "one" and "all" are not the same number of persons. Everyone logically means "each and every one" or "each person," with the emphasis on individuality, not on community. "Everyone" is one person, so they later in the sentence is not grammatically logical.

If you have just now decided never again to say the word everyone in public, please reconsider!

In conversation, educated speakers frequently use everyone or everybody to mean "all of you." In writing, however, very careful writers choose some version of the statement that avoids grammatical disagreement between a pronoun and the word it refers to.

Below, you'll see some grammatically correct alternatives to the traditionally incorrect sentence

"When driving, everyone should signal before they change lanes."

Here's my favorite correction because it's slightly shorter and avoids that problem altogether:

"When driving, everyone should signal before changing lanes."

Here are other grammatically correct options:

· When driving, all of us should signal before we change lanes.

· When driving, we should signal before we change lanes.

· When driving, all drivers should signal before they change lanes.

· When driving, everyone should signal before he or she changes lanes. (Too formal, a bit awkward.)

· When driving, you should signal before you change lanes. (Avoids the issue by changing to another point of view.)

This week, give this concept of grammatical logic a try by fixing any pronoun disagreements that you come across in your discussion of drafts in your team and whole-class discussions. We learn language by using language in real situations!

Check your facts

In an age when information is readily available to us 24/7, we may need to develop habits that help us sort fact from fiction, both for our own protection and for our readers' protection.

Here's a link to a business writing blog by Lynn Gaertner-Johnston that offers some tips on when and how to make sure you're passing along sound information to your co-workers and clients:

Fact Checking to the Rescue