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.

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