goodreport.ppt

How to Write a Good Report Alan Lee Contents What makes a good report? Clarity and Structure Figures and Tables (floats) Technical Issues Further reading Conclusions The purpose The report exists to provide the reader with useful information Should this drug be licensed? How do we fit non-linear regressions? It succeeds if it effectively communicates the information to the intended audience It fails otherwise!! 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 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 doesn’t want to grapple with all the gory technical details The guru who wants the whole story 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! 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 Structure: details A good report has the following parts Title Table of Contents Abstract/executive summary Introduction Main sections Conclusions References Technical appendix 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) Table of Contents Shows the structure of the document and lets the reader navigate through the s