Suggestions for Project Reports

Your project report should complement your presentation. If the presentation is "telling the boss [or board] about your project," the report is "documenting your project for future reference." It provides you with the opportunity to go into detail. It should communicate just as well to potential readers five years from now as it does to your initial audience.

Most of what you learned in English class about essay-writing still applies to a project report - or to any business report for that matter. Use good grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Use complete sentences and effective paragraphs. Employ clear language. Avoid awkward or passive constructions.

However, there is one key lesson from English class that you need to un-learn for effective business writing. Here, the conclusion comes FIRST.

Once you think about it, this makes sense. Business executives are busy people. They often need to make many decisions over the course of a day, and have hired competent people to help them make and execute those decisions. Often, the five-minute explanation is sufficient, and it is not necessary to read through the entire (long) document. Other times, more detail is required, and perusal of the full report (or sections of it) is needed in order to obtain that detail. And in many cases the full report serves an archival purpose, so that five years from now the boss (perhaps a different boss by that time) can know what decision was made and why it was made.

Accordingly, your project report should start with an EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. This should run a MAXIMUM of one page. It should give the "Reader's Digest" version of your project - what you found out, and why you believe the conclusion is (or isn't) reliable. Realize that in the "real world" the executive summary may be the only part of the report that is actually read. Hence it should be brief yet complete.

Follow the executive summary with more detailed discussion. This should cover the four key areas of the presentation (research question, data, analysis, conclusions). It quite possibly will expand upon them. For example, the presentation may only have covered a few of the most important analyses; the written report can give everything.

If the analysis is extensive, it may be more effective to provide summary results in the "Analysis" section and have a "Technical Appendix" at the end of the report which gives all the details of that analysis. (For example, if your analysis invoves ten different hypothesis tests, report on those results in "Analysis" and save the pages of computations for the Appendix.)

The test of an effective writeup is whether someone who did not hear the presentation still read the report (often, skim the report) and still understand the essentials of what is going on.

Of course, all project reports for this course should be typed. Use the Equation Editor (or something similar) to type any mathematical equations. Ideally, word processing or desktop publishing tools would be used to insert any relevant graphics into the document. However, this can be time-consuming for many statistical applications (such as, for example, a drawing of the normal distribution), and so I will allow those to be neatly hand-drawn. Multiple-page documents (and this will be) should of course have the pages stapled together. Do not feel obliged to indulge in fancy cover graphics or report covers - too often these speak to the triumph of style over substance.

Remember: now matter how good, insightful, and ground-breaking your research is, if you cannot communicate your results effectively your efforts will simply be wasted. Good presentations and good reports are essential parts of good business practice.