Tools to Facilitate Reading and Validating a report
Title page
The most important feature is the authors, and date of publication. Regarding authors any information giving the reader more information to judge the writers credibility, should be included. All other information about the author is not useful, and will distract the reader from important information.
- Name, title, function academic degrees.
- For students: Full name as it will appears in the HES registration and student number
- Always a date of publication
Table of Contents
Obviously the table of contents is the first point of contact and gives the reader a clear overview of how the report is organized. Remember, business readers (and many of your teachers) do not open a report and begin on page 1 and read through to the end. They will look for the sections which are most interesting to them. If the relevant section is not easily spotted on the table of contents, the reader might well decide that it is not there and lay the report aside.
On the other hand, if there are too many entries on the table of contents, then it will be difficult to find the subject of interest for the reader.
The rule of thumb is to include chapter-, section- and subheadings. Individual paragraphs or charts and graphs are too detailed a category to be included on the table of contents.
Chapter and section heading
Chapters divide the information presented by function. Each chapter has a different objective. The introduction is about orientation and is descriptive information, the problem analysis is about cause and effect. The findings are also descriptive information, conclusions are once ...