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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