Reports
Reports are one of the most common assessment tasks across disciplines. They have a distinct style, structure, and purpose. Unlike essays, reports are formal, focused, and written for a specific audience. Once you understand these differences, writing a report becomes much easier.
Differences between reports and essays
Essays are written in flowing paragraphs, each with a clear topic sentence. Sometimes they’re split into sections with headings, but that’s mostly to help guide the reader. Both essays and reports include an introduction, body, and conclusion. They both use evidence, in-text citations, and a reference list, and they stick to formal academic writing. But that’s where the similarities end.
Sections in a report
The following information outlines what is commonly included in most reports. Please check your own unit requirements before applying these guidelines. We do not include a literature review here, which is common is some reports (empirical reports), but not others (business reports, case study reports). If a literature review is included in a report, it goes after the introduction and before the method section.
Business reports
The purpose of writing reports in business disciplines is to prepare students for the workplace where most forms of information are communicated in some form of a report. This is particularly the case in commercial contexts or workplaces within the public service.
Depending on the aim of the report (and specific business discipline area), it can require presentation of information only (financial statements for commerce and accounting); information with interpretation (product analysis for marketing); or information with analysis and recommendations (management and other areas).
Scientific reports
The purpose of scientific reports is to communicate results from your technical or scientific experiments to an audience of scientific peers. It also outlines the state of a technical or scientific research problem. Scientific reports are normally published in relevant discipline-area journals. Students are being trained to write scientific reports in a like-manner, though of course the audience is the lecturer and the purpose is assessment.
Typically, scientific reports follow the AIMRaD structure strictly (Abstract, Introduction, Method, Results and Discussion). Sometimes they are called ‘research/scholarly reports’ or ‘research papers’ or ‘empirical reports’.
General structure
Scientific reports are usually written in science, engineering, IT, and psychology disciplines and require you to outline and analyse specific research you have conducted. But, as you will see in examples further on, the structure can vary according to the field of study.