Chapter 20 Informal Reports

1. Chapter 20Informal Reports

2. Informal Reports • Are fairly routine documents inside all workplaces • Cover many different subjects and can be composed in many different forms • Are important in many different workplace and rhetorical situations • Are typically progress or status reports, lab reports, directives, and incident reports

3. Progress Reports • Update audiences on the status of an ongoing project • Detail where a project is in relation to its overall goals and objectives • Allow writers to communicate with supervisors or managers • Must usually be written during various stages of a project

4. Progress Reports • Provide their audiences with projections about future activities and expected dates of completion • Can be written in memo or letter form • Describe the details of a project over time • Provide readers with an honest assessment of the project’s status

5. Lab Reports • Document the procedures, methods, and results of a lab experiment and explain their significance • Demonstrate the writer’s understanding and comprehension of the data, the underlying concepts behind it, and the principles and reasons behind the experiment itself • Usually cover a great deal of information for their readers, explaining their purposes, results, problems, and recommendations

6. Lab Reports • Contain a title page • Contain an abstract • Contain an introduction that states objectives • Contain procedures followed during the experiment • Contain results • Contain conclusions • Contain a list of references, if any • Contain appendices that provide raw data

7. Directives • Apprise audiences of policies or procedures that they should know and follow • Are often in email, memo, or letter format • Should discuss the unfamiliar policies in-depth • Often include categories for grouping information under separate headings • Are forms of instruction and awareness to help employees do their jobs according to proper protocols

8. Incident Reports • Document events in the workplace such as accidents, emergencies, and problems • Explain to readers what caused the incident and how the incident is being handled • May also serve as a kind of warning • Can be written as memos, letters, or emails, but can also be pre-written forms

9. Informal Reports • Are written to help solve problems • Are often written as memos, letters, or emails, or given as oral presentations • Share similar structures, including an introduction, a body, and a conclusion • Must consider the rhetorical situation and audience

10. Ethical Issues • Do not differ all that much from the ethical issues that arise when composing other kinds of workplace documents • Are concerned with disclosure, or telling audiences everything they need to know about a project, experiment, situation, or problem • Are concerned with accuracy