| Checklist for Writing Management Reports (2008) | |||||||||||||
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| These guidelines refer to a management report written to gain acceptance for a recommended course of action. As you can see, it is no simple matter to write an effective report. The checklist includes over 60 items (over seventy if you count the bullet points under general guidelines). If your report is important, I suggest that you go through the checklist in a systematic way. I was going to put an asterisk beside each guideline that was typically violated in management reports. I gave up as most of the items would have an asterisk. The importance weights for items would vary depending on the situation. As a result, it only makes sense to average across items if you want to assess the improvement when revising a given report. I do not advise using this checklist for making comparisons among reports written by different people. Finally, we will never be able to get everything into guidelines. Some people have the creativity and flair for writing, and that is not captured by guidelines. These guidelines are provided under the assumption that you have strong arguments to support your recommendations. If not, most can be ignored or reversed, because you would then want to make your report obscure – don’t let them know that you have nothing important to say. For more on this, see my Dr. Fox extension (under Full-Text Papers at www.jscottarmstrong.com – see “Unintelligible Management Research and Academic Prestige, ” 1980). Suggestions in this checklist were drawn from my forthcoming book, Advertising and the Science of Persuasion and from Ehrenberg (1981). Some advice is based on received wisdom. Target Market 1. Be sure you understand who you are writing for and what their expectations are. The most effective way to do this is to ask someone to adopt the role of the target market and provide comments. | |||||||||||||
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