ClearTips: Riveting reports
What's your main topic?
Your first answer will likely be broad, so take the time
to be more specific. Clearly specifying your topic narrows the boundaries
of what your report will cover and keeps it from rambling or unraveling.
The first answer a team at the Census Bureau gave for a
policy brief to be drawn from a massive compilation of data:
Population growth
After a bit of probing, we narrowed it to:
Projected growth of the U.S. population by state between
1995 and 2025
I immediately had a clear picture of what the policy brief
would cover.
The first answer a team at the World Bank came up with for
a chapter in the World Development Report on knowledge for development
was just that:
Knowledge for development
Well, there are many kinds of knowledge and lots of development,
past and prospective, so we narrowed the topic to:
Nurturing local and global networks of people marshaling
knowledge for human and economic development
That later changed, but at least it began to sharpen the
focus.
I once had a pair of authors who wanted me to give them
a hand in putting together a book summing up three years of work in developing
a new survey method. To my deceptively simple question, one of them answered:
A guide for policymakers on how to interpret the survey's
findings
To which the other said, "No, no, no." Instead,
the topic was:
A manual for statisticians on how to conduct such a survey
They went back and forth on this for about an hour,
so I left. They ended up writing two books, each on his own.
Start by writing—then refining—the first
words that come into your head. Then ask yourself the usual who? what?
when? where? how? Avoid such phrases as a report on, a review
of, an analysis of, which can distract you from a clear statement
of your topic. And test your topic on a few colleagues to see if they
understand it or have something to add.
Back to Riveting reports
• Next
|