How to Write a Good Report

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How to Write a Good Report

• Alan Lee

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Contents

• What makes a good report?
• Clarity and Structure
• Figures and Tables (floats)
• Technical Issues
• Further reading
• Conclusions

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The purpose....

• The report exists to provide the answer to a
  question.
• Should this drug be licensed?
• How do we fit non-linear regressions?
• It succeeds if it communicates the answer to the
  intended audience
• It fails otherwise!!

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To succeed...

• The report must be
• Clear
• Well structured, clear, concise, suitable for the
  intended audience
• Professional
• statistically correct, correctly spelled,
  produced with a decent word processor
• Well illustrated
• illustrations that aid understanding, integrated
  with text

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The audience

• Often 3 different audiences
• The casual reader/big boss who wants the main
  message as painlessly as possible
• The interested reader who wants more detail but
  doesnt want to grapple with all the gory
  technical details
• The guru who wants the whole story

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What to do?

• To address all 3 audiences effectively,
• Include an abstract for the big boss
• A main body for the interested non-specialist
• A technical appendix for the guru
• Thus, a structure emerges!

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Structure

• Good structure enhances and encourages clarity
• Gives signposts
• implements the vital principle
• tell them what you are going to say
• Say it!
• tell them what you have said

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Structure details

• A good report has the following parts
• Title
• Table of Contents
• Abstract/executive summary
• Introduction
• Main sections
• Conclusions
• References
• Technical appendix

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Title

• Should be informative, punchy, can include
  puns, humour
• Good
• The perfidious polynomial (punchy, alliterative)
• Diagnosing diabetes mellitus how to test, who to
  test, when to test (dramatic, informative)
• Bad
• Some bounds on the distribution of certain
  quadratic forms in normal random variables
  (boring, vague)
• Performing roundoff analyses of statistical
  algorithms (boring, vague)

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Table of Contents

• Shows the structure of the document and lets the
  reader navigate through the sections
• Include for documents more than a few pages long.

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Abstract/executive summary

• Describes the problem and the solution in a few
  sentences. It will be all the big boss reads!
• Remember the 2 rules
• Keep it short
• State problem and solution

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The Introduction

• State the question, background the problem
• Describe similar work
• Outline the approach
• Describe the contents of the rest of the paper
• in Section 2 we ...
• in Section 3 we ...

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Further sections

• Describe
• Data
• Methods
• Analyses
• Findings
• Dont include too much technical detail
• Divide up into sections, subsections

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Conclusions/summary

• Summarize what has been discovered
• Repeat the question
• Give the answer

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Appendix

• This is where the technical details go
• Be as technical as you like
• Document your analysis so it can be reproduced by
  others
• Include the data set if feasible

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References

• Always cite (i.e. give a reference) to other
  related work or facts/opinions that you quote
• Never pass off the work of others as your own
  this is plagiarism and is a very big academic
  crime!!

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How to cite

• In the text
• Seber and Wild (1989) state that..
• In the references
• Seber, G.A.F and C.J. Wild. (1989). Nonlinear
  Regression. New York Wiley.

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Writing clearly

• Structure alone is not enough for clarity you
  must also write clear sentences.
• Rules
• Write complete short sentences
• Avoid jargon and cliché, strive for simplicity
• One theme per paragraph
• If a sentence contains maths, it still must make
  sense!

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AGHHHH!

• He wrote
• Although solitary under normal prevailing
  circumstances, raccoons may congregate
  simultaneously in certain situations of
  artificially enhanced resource availability.
• He meant..
• Raccoons live alone but come together to eat
  bait.

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Maths

• Good
• Bad

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Figures and Tables (Floats)

• Golden rules for Figures and Tables
• Describe float in text (integration), make sure
  it matches description
• Place after the first mention in the text
• Make sure float conveys the desired message
  clearly keep it simple!

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Figures

• Always label and give a caption under the figure
• Be aware of good graphics principles avoid
• chart junk
• low data/ink ratio
• unlabelled axes
• broken axes
• Misleading scales

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Tables

• Always label and give a caption over the table
• Be aware of rules for good tables
• avoid vertical lines
• dont have too many decimal places
• compare columns not rows

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Technical Issues

• Sectioning
• Table of Contents
• Spelling and Grammar
• Choice of word processor

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Sectioning

• Proper division of your work into sections and
  subsections makes the structure clear and the
  document easy to follow
• Use styles in word/ sectioning commands in Latex
• \beginsection.\endsection

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Table of contents

• Provides navigation aid
• Make sure TOC agrees with main body of text
• If you use styles (Word) and sectioning commands
  (Latex) this will happen automatically

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Spelling and Grammar

• Use a style manual/dictionary if in doubt
• Spell check!!!!
• Proofread!!!!
• He meant
• This technique can also be applied to the
  analysis of golf balls
• He typed.
• This technique cam also by applies to the
  analysis or gold bills

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Choice of word processor

• Word or Latex?
• My spin..
• Use Word for a short document with few figures
  and tables and little mathematics
• Use Latex for a longer document with many figures
  and tables and/or lots of complicated maths.

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Further reading

• There are many excellent books giving good advice
  on technical writing.
• Two I like are
• Higham, Nicholas (1993) Handbook of writing for
  the Mathematical Sciences, Philadelphia, SIAM.
• Silyn-Roberts, Heather (2000). Writing for
  Science and Engineering Papers Presentations and
  Reports. Oxford Butterworth-Heinmann.
• Both discuss writing reports and giving verbal
  presentations.

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Conclusions

• Structure is vital
• Write clearly
• Good clear simple illustrations
• Spellcheck and proofread
• Reference all material used or quoted