Writing Informal/Formal Reports By Jonathen Peck

A report is defined as an organized presentation of factual information prepared for a specific audience. Beyond that they can be broken down into two different categories. These two categories are informal and formal reports. First off the main difference between them is usually length and amount of time and scope of coverage on the topic. Formal reports generally take many months and run about several hundred pages with devices to aid the reader to help find specific points throughout the whole report. Informal reports are more toned down running only a few paragraphs to a couple pages and provide information on projects that take only a few hours or days to complete.

Informal Reports

Most informal reports describe incidents, note the progress of ongoing activities or summarize the results on these projects. Due to the nature of the use for these reports they are typically written as a memo, letter or email message.

Key questions to ask yourself when considering audience and purpose are:

• Who is the audience?
• What specifically have the readers requested?
• How knowledgeable are your readers on the subject?
• Have you selected the right format?
• Have you provided the background information?

Types of informal reports

1. Trouble Reports
2. Investigative Reports
3. Progress Reports
4. Periodic Reports
5. Trip Reports
6. Test Reports

Formal Reports

These reports are written accounts of major projects such as new developments, exploration of a new product, or an end of year review on new developments. Formal reports are very long and require a great deal of formatting to help the reader and to be presented professionally. Most formal reports include a cover letter and a table on contents at the beginning.

Key Parts of a Formal Report

• Table of contents
• Executive Summary
• Conclusions
• Recommendations
  
• works Cited

Formal Reports also must have supplementary back matter including a bibliography, appendixes, a glossary, and an index that shows a list of all major topics and subtopics in the report.

I have never written a formal report and it seems these take a lot of time and research on a certain topic. They require a great deal of knowledge on the subject. Informal reports on the other hand you can find yourself writing these week to week for your job. Over my career I really did not realize I would write types of informal reports. I've written accident reports to progress reports.

Sources:
Writing That Works(Oliu, Brusaw, Alred)