Contemporary Business Report Writing, 4thEdition

Contemporary Business Report Writing, 4th Edition

INSTRUCTOR’S MANUAL—Chapter 2

ORIENTATION TO BUSINESS REPORTS: PLANNING AND WRITING SIMPLE REPORTS - CHAPTERS 1-8

Chapters 1 through 8 should help students develop a sense of the context in which they will be called upon to plan and write business reports. Reports are essential tools in organizational communication, affecting the decision-making process at all organizational levels. Since reports are so vital to organizational success, they will also influence your students’ career success. Reports originating with other people will convey information your students need to perform their duties effectively; and reports that your students generate, as business employees, will provide information that others need to meet their responsibilities. The success of those reports may also be used to evaluate an employee’s performance.

These eight chapters introduce students to the reporting function in business and writing considerations that apply to all types of reports.

CHAPTER 2—PLANNING THE REPORT

Chapter 2 emphasizes the importance of process in planning a report. The chapter emphasizes that planning both simple and complex reports requires decisions about the report's purpose, audience, context, content, medium, and structure. Students are reminded that the steps in the process are dependent upon the complexity of the situation and the message.

The chapter includes examples of different message structures and strategies for outlining a report. The chapter concludes with a discussion of ethical issues that may arise as a writer plans and outlines the report.

The concept of careful planning must be combined with the techniques for outlining. You may find the material more manageable by splitting the material into two reading / discussion/application assignments. For example, you might assign the planning section (pages27–40) for one reading assignment, followed by a class discussion focused on the planning aspects of the scenarios in Application 1. (Include “Ethical Considerations”—pages 50 and 51 in this first assignment.) This could be followed by assigning the outlining section (pages 40–47), after which students could work in groups to develop and present an outline for assigned scenarios from Application 1. (Include “Collaborative Writing”—pages 47-50—in this second assignment.)

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Upon completion of this chapter, students should be able to do the following.

  • Identify the purpose, audience, and context for a report
  • Select appropriate report content
  • Choose an appropriate medium
  • Choose a report structure that complements its purpose, audience, context, and content
  • Apply outlining strategies and electronic technology to develop report structure
  • Collaborate effectively to plan a report
  • Consider ethical implications that arise during the planning process

TEACHING SUGGESTIONS

A. Planning the Report

Use a transparency or other visual representation of Illustration 2.1 to discuss the planning process.

  • Identify purpose. Discuss the difference between general purpose (production, innovation, maintenance) and specific purpose (desired reader action) of a message.
  • Identify audience. Define primary and secondary audience and explain the relationship of audience identification to other factors such as message content, structure, style, and medium. Solicit examples from students.
  • Identify context. Review the importance of the physical and psychological environments in the communication process. Discuss how context analysis will influence other factors such as report content, structure, and medium.
  • Identify content. Emphasize the importance of completeness--including all that must be said; and remind students of the importance of conciseness--excluding anything that is not essential for the report user.
  • Select medium. Discuss Lengel and Daft's Media Richness Hierarchy (Illustration 2.2) and the interaction of media richness and problem complexity (Illustration 2.3) in predicting relative effectiveness of various media. Ask students to suggest kinds of messages that would be appropriate for the different media examples.
  • Choose report structure. Discuss the structures (direct, indirect, chronological, problem-solution, cause-effect, spatial, topical, and comparison or contrast). Remind students that those structures may apply to paragraphs or parts of a report as well as to an entire report. Emphasize that many writers employ combinations of those structures in a report.

Throughout the discussion, emphasize the recursive and interdependent nature of the process. For example, a writer may modify choices about content, medium, or report structure as he or she changes the view of the audience.

B. Outlining the Report

Discuss informal outlines as tools to help identify essential content and to organize it appropriately. Emphasize that the complexity of the report content often determines the degree of outline formality. Use Illustration 2.4 (Formal Outline) to show how an outline should reflect earlier decisions made about report structure.

Point out how a decimal outline differs from a traditional one by comparing Illustrations 2.4and 2.5. Highlight the outline guides, which specify how to divide report content and title report topics. If possible, demonstrate the outline feature of word processing andshowits value in planning a report.

C. Collaborative Writing

To help students understand the dynamics of teamwork, point up the stages of team development: forming, storming, norming, and performing—plus adjourning. Help students understand that effective collaborative writing requires purposeful integration of individual and collective activities. Refer to Illustration 2.6 as youdiscuss the skillful coordination of individual and collective work required for successful collaborative writing. In addition, you may reproduce the Group Participation Rating Form and request students to complete it during one or more of your collaborative assignments.

D. Ethical Considerations

In Chapter 1 of the text, review Routes to Moral Judgments (Illustration 1.4) and Questions to Direct Moral Decision-Making (Illustration 1.5). Use an application such as Application 1b or 1g to illustrate how different routes may result in different decisions about message content, medium, and structure.

E. Topics for Discussion

Use Topics for Discussion to review the concepts presented in this chapter. Answers will vary. To promote collaborative work and to begin to build confidence for business presentations, a good technique is to divide the class into groups of two or three students. Assign an individual item from “Topics for Discussion” to each group. Ask them to discuss the item and have a designated spokesperson share the results of their discussion in a brief oral presentation. Encourage audience members to ask questions, thereby helping the speakers “think on their feet.”

G. Applications

Application 1. The introduction to this chapter suggests ways to use scenarios in Application 1 to reinforce the concepts presented in the text. Notice that directions ask students only to plan the report collaboratively, develop an outline, and present planning decisions to the class.

Application 2. Before assigning this application, you may prefer to wait until after you cover Chapter 3 in class since that chapter deals with essential report-writing topics (drafting, revising, editing, and producing the document). If students write the reports at this point, emphasize applying the criteria for effective reports presented in Chapter 1 and guide them toward an appropriate format for each message. You can do that by previewing one or more formats illustrated in Chapter 6.

Application 3. In this application, students use their word processor’s outline feature to outline reports. Note that an informal outline may be appropriate for several topics (topics dealing with person you admire, time management strategies, and charter schools), while a formal outline would be better for the other topics. Several topics (the printer/scanner/copier, identity theft insurance, and alternative fuel examples) may require some research. You may want to narrow it in order to keep the focus on outlining. For example, you may recommend doing a keyword search on the Web or reading Web sites and printed publications that you pre-selected.