A crucial lesson to learn about report writing, and writing in general, is that “good writing” is entirely subjective. There are certainly general guidelines for writing a report, particularly an academic report. You avoid slang, write in third person, stop using contractions, maintain at least five sentences per paragraph, etc. These are “rules” that have likely been drilled into your head since at least middle school. However, this doesn’t mean that every report you read is going to follow those conventions and just because a report does not follow those conventions does not mean it is bad, you might even enjoy a casual tone a little more than formal one or vice versa because, again, “good writing” is subjective. So, if “good writing” is subjective, how does one become a “good writer,” you might ask. The answer is practice, practice and more practice. With practice, you develop a style, and with a style, your work becomes your own rather than some paragraphs that follow a rigid set of rules. There will, rather unfortunately, still be people who don’t like your style of writing, just like how there will be people who really like your style of writing; everything is a matter of taste. How exactly do we write something the reader will like if everything is a matter of taste? The answer is simple: knowing your audience is one of the most important things to remember when you write your report.

Your audience is whoever will read your written work, that could be a professor or, like in the case of MATE, judges at a competition or anyone in between. I am not writing a report right now, I’m writing a blog post, and the audience is anyone who may want help with report writing, which is you! That’s why I’ve taken on a casual tone. I’m still using contractions, and I might even throw in a little slang because my current audience is casual readers. But if this were a report and my audience was a professor, I would likely take on a very different tone. Sometimes those types of things might be explicitly stated, other times you need to make an inference, and in general, you can infer, write in third person, use a professional tone, write complete sentences and complete paragraphs, avoid contractions and use proper grammar.

Once you have the basics down, you must also think about what your audience knows. For example, suppose your audience is the general public. In that case, you’ll need to avoid or very clearly define jargon and provide more background on what might be considered “general knowledge in the field.” When someone says “general knowledge in the field,” they mean things that would be considered well-known to anyone with experience in the particular field, like Ohm’s law in electrical engineering, or conflict in Language Arts. But if your audience is just anyone, they might not know this “general knowledge in the field” because they aren’t in that field. Hence, you need more references and explanations. This would change if my audience were instead one of my English professors, suddenly I would no longer need to define what a metaphor is to say that Juliet’s line “O happy dagger, This is thy sheath. There rust and let me die” in Romeo and Juliet is a metaphor. I might provide some context for the line in the play before I argue about what I think this metaphor is saying, because maybe they haven’t read the play, but I would assume that they understood what a metaphor is because that particular piece of information is “general knowledge within the field.”

Even once you understand what needs to go in a report, and how much background you need to provide about an argument you are trying to make, it can be hard to know what it will take to prove that argument. Now I could go on and on about logical fallacies when proving arguments, because there are many, and they are sometimes exceptionally hard to avoid. Instead, I’d rather talk about the best report-writing advice I have ever received. Imagine, as you’re writing your report, that someone is leaning over your shoulder watching you type, and every time you write a sentence, try to form some argument, they shake their head at you and say, “Nope, I don’t believe you.” Now your job is no longer to state an argument but to prove it to your slightly annoying imaginary friend. When you write a report, there are very few cases where you would want to remain impartial; often, you write a report to prove or support a point you are trying to make, so convince them. Be exhaustive. Support your conclusion until you feel confident that that imaginary person would have nothing left to say. Then you get to imagine them being frustrated that they have nothing to fire back, that’s the vindication for having to prove so much.

Now that you know how to decide what to say and how much of it to say, there still may be questions about how. That’s where you come in. Your style and your voice are something that will be entirely unique to you! That’s the fun part! It may also be the scary part, but that’s what practice is for. I could go on and on, like I have been in the rest of this post, about the best way to represent your arguments in a report, but remember when I was talking about subjectiveness? Yeah, that would just be me telling you that my writing is the best ever writing style. You know your audience, you know some general guidelines, from there, the world, well, your report at least, is your oyster! It’s your opinions and your arguments that you want to present; that’s why having your voice shine through, not mine, not your professors’, but yours, is incredibly important to your report. It’s what makes it unique, which will make it interesting, even if it’s an argument someone has read about a million times before. Happy report writing!