Be sure and see the example data reports.
Letter of Transmittal
I would appreciate your thoughts, reactions, criticism regarding this chapter: your response—David McMurrey.
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Contents of This Section
Transmittal letter
Covers and label
Table of contents
List of figures
Abstract and executive summary
Introduction
Body of the report
Conclusion
Appendixes
Information sources
Page numbering
Main index
Data Report Study Guide
About Data Reports
Data reports are used in every industry and branch of government:
- Police departments give reports on crime statistics.
- Public corporations of every kind put out quarterly financial reports.
- Non-profit watchdog groups provide data reports on government spending.
- Environmental consultants report on pollution levels and fish populations.
This article lists a wide variety of data reports, but in this lesson the data report will not attempt to state recommendations or justifications. In the next lesson, you'll write a data report that includes conclusions and recommendation.
A data report, here, is a report containing lots of data in the form of tables, charts, and graphs. The technical writer would typically receive just the tabular data as source and be challenged to create charts and graphs that more vividly depict the data in those tables. The technical writer would also use bullet format to state up to a dozen key trends and conclusions in the tabular data. The results of the technical writer's work would be a data report that is much much easier to skim and pick up the key points.
Examples of Data Reports
Targeted Summary of Minnesota Water Quality Assessment Report 2016 By Laurie Reeter, 2019.
Recreational Visits Assessment U.S. National Park Service 2019. By Taylor Walters, 2020.
Orange County Waste Composition Study June 2017. By Rebecca Rakes, 2019.
Take a look at how these data reports from the Texas Education Agency presents its data:
Secondary School Completion and Dropouts in Texas Public Schools 2016-17 . Source: Texas Education Agency.
Obviously, much of the report has been taken out. But notice that the table is presented first followed by bullet points that state key facts in the table data. Notice too that standard parts of a report would also be written by the technical writer.
Write a Draft of Your Data Report
Before you begin your work on the data report, be sure to review these two resources which you'll need to write your report:
Here is a big chunk of data—all in the form of dense tables. Who wants to churn through all that for key trends and conclusions? Nobody! But the task of developing a data report, sometimes called the fact sheet, falls to the good and loyal hard-working technical writer: namely you.
Advancing Sustainable Materials Management: 2015Tables and Figures
Your job is to produce the following (MSW refers to municipal solid waste):
- MSW Generation Rates, 1960 to 2015 (line graph)
- MSW Recycling and Composting Rates, 1960 to 2015 (line graph)
- Management of MSW in the United States, 2015 (pie chart)
- Any brief tables you select or create that support the discussion.
Your data report will contribute to an assessment of trends in material generation, recycling, composting, energy recovery and landfilling in the United States. Even through, your data report will a contribution to a larger project, design your report as a complete report with title page, table of contents, list of figures, and textual discussion of the charts, graphs, and tables.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.