ClearTips: Riveting reports

How long should your report be?

Or better still: How much time will your audience devote to reading it? If only 10 minutes, your report should be about 10 double-spaced pages. It may be hard to chop 90 pages off your planned 100-pager, but remember that few people read an entire report, no matter how riveting, and that shorter reports are usually tighter—and better written.

Many people come up with an imprecise estimate:

However long it ends up

or:

Around 10 to 20 pages

Much more useful is:

10 double-spaced pages of typescript

On average, your readers cruise along at about 250 words a minute, or roughly 1 double-spaced page a minute. So if your audience is spending 10 minutes on your report, that's 2,500 words, or 10 double-spaced pages.

That's precisely what we came up with for a report on urban poverty for the Rockefeller Foundation. Millions of dollars in research. Thousands of pages of write-ups. Twelve researchers and project managers sitting around a conference table, thinking, no doubt, that their policy report would run 100 to 200 pages. But the discipline of tailoring the length of the report to the attention that it might command from legislators and senior administration officials led us to 10 double-spaced pages.

Once you have an estimate of the number of pages (units of display), try to convert that into numbers of paragraphs (units of composition). If you're writing 10 double-spaced pages, that's roughly 25 paragraphs (at 2.5 per page). And if you're writing 10 single-spaced pages, that's roughly 40 paragraphs (at 4 per page).

If the length of your report gets out of hand, prepare an executive summary. And if the summary gets too long for your core audience, try a cover note that presents your messages.

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