ClearTips: Riveting reports
Your supporting messages
A short piece of writing may not have supporting messages,
relying instead on a series of points to support the main message. A longer
piece generally needs supporting messages, but you should avoid having
more than three or four if you want your readers to remember them. Your
supporting messages divide your argument and thus become the conceptual
architecture that informs your outline.
Here's the main message for that Rockefeller Foundation
report I mentioned in Chapter 1:
Higher program participation, higher placement in jobs,
higher pay-these are the payoffs possible from an integrated program
of education and employment that can be delivered at reasonable cost.
And here are the supporting messages:
Job training should develop specific work skills.
Basic skills training should be related to the job.
Education and employment programs should be tied to the
requirements of industry.
Those programs should also be tailored to the individual.
Training should be surrounded with a full array of support
services.
These five sentences are the essence of what the research
team wanted to communicate to legislators and program administrators.
It took 12 people half a day to come up with them.
Here, the main message for the World Development Report
1997:
An effective, capable state is vital for the provision
of the goods and services, rules, and institutions that allow markets
to flourish and people to lead healthier, happier lives.
And here, the supporting messages:
To make the state a more effective partner in a country's
development, the state's role should be matched to its capability.
Raising a state's capability so that it reinvigorates
public institutions means first designing effective rules and restraints
that check arbitrary state actions and combat entrenched corruption.
Removing obstacles to state reform will only succeed if
efforts are directed by leaders with a clear vision of the way things
could be, and a contagious determination to turn that vision into reality.
In a World Bank report for governments and the media in
the Middle East and North Africa, the main message set the challenge echoed
in the report's title, Claiming the Future:
By 2010 the countries of the Middle East and North Africa
have the potential to double incomes, increase life expectancy by close
to 10 years, and cut illiteracy and infant mortality by almost half.
And the supporting messages elaborated on the promise:
They could become full partners in the global economy
using integration with Europe and within the region as a stepping stone
to international competitiveness.
The faster economic growth would reduce poverty and bring
down unemployment, restoring hope to millions.
Peace, macroeconomic stability, and an attractive investment
environment could attract billions of dollars of capital from nationals
and foreign investors.
In a chapter in a recent Human Development Report
entitled "Still an Unequal World," the main message was
In no society today do women enjoy the same opportunities
as men.
And the supporting messages:
This unequal status leaves considerable disparities between
how much women contribute to human development and how little they share
in its benefits.
A widespread pattern of inequality between women and men
persists-in their access to education, health and nutrition, and even
more in their participation in the economic and political spheres.
Women now share much more in the benefits of social services,
both public and private-but continue to be denied equal opportunities
for political and economic participation.
Women do not enjoy the same protection and rights as men
in the laws of many countries.
Announced in the opening paragraph of that chapter, these
messages drove the headings for the content that followed.
Here's the main message for a short policy brief on population
projections from the Census Bureau:
As the U.S. population rises by 72 million over the next
30 years—to 335 million in 2025—more of us will live in the
South and West, be elderly, and have Hispanic and Asian roots.
And the supporting messages, with their numerical detail:
The South and West will add 59 million residents by 2025—82
percent of the projected growth to 2025—with more than 30 million
people in just three states: California, Texas, and Florida.
Also by 2025, the population 65 and older will rise by
28 million people—39 percent of the projected growth—and bring
to 27 the number of states where a fifth of their people will be elderly.
Only Florida is close today.
The Hispanic and Asian populations will together gain
44 million people and constitute 24 percent of the total population
in 2025, up from 14 percent today. California, Texas, and Florida will
gain 20 million Hispanics.
Again, these four sentences were strung together—with
bullets—to open the brief and, as you'll see in the next chapters,
drive the headings for the content that followed.
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