"Ah now. You know it's not the writin' down. It's the assembly."
Business Reports: Tiered for Impact
Because business reports travel upward, downward, and laterally within an organization, reading and writing reports is a typical part of nearly every manager's duties.
Course Objectives:
- Employ an efficient process for planning and organizing information and ideas.
- Eliminate “information dumping” in reports.
- Understand how to tier information appropriately in reports to match multiple audience needs, including both lateral and executive readers.
- Ensure report content conveys information needed for business decisions, within a readily absorbed format.
- Eliminate jargon and deadwood from the text, to streamline business message.
- Reduce the amount of time required to write and read reports.
- Write an executive summary with impact.
Course Outline:1. Introduction
* Write As If Your Career and Business Depends On It. It Does!
* Basic Ingredients: Content and Process
2. 6-Steps to Effective Business Writing
* Full process explained and applied to reports
3. Status Reports: Structure and Strategy
* Overview of Reports
* Order of Elements in a Report
* Breakdown of Elements: Tiers One to Four
* The Executive Summary highlighted
* Class exercise based on scenario
4. Examples and Exercises
* 1 strong report – with illustration and discussion of structure and content that works
* Exercise structuring a status report into appropriate information tiers
5. Style: Organization and Presentation
* Headings and Sub-headings
* Using Tables, Graphs and Illustrations
* Overall Considerations for reports to multiple audiences
6. Style, Tone and Word Choice
* Active Voice vs. Passive Voice
* Eliminate "Deadwood" and Using Straight Talk
* Power of verbs
* Reader-Focused Wording
*Stylistic Considerations
*Eliminate Jargon
Wrap-Up
* Evaluate Training
* Resources to Support Training Concepts
Register now to improve your business writing.