ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines some fundamental aspects of report writing and takes you through general differences in format, describing the general features of report writing and detailing the differences between business and scientific reports. Reports are different to essays in terms of their objective and basically inform through the presentation of facts. In this sense the academic report is the same as a workplace report in that it generally presents facts to a reader who may not be aware of them but needs the information to make a decision or carry out a task. Both essays and reports are written with a particular audience in mind. The brief for an essay is wider in scope than for a report, whose intent is narrower and certainly more functional. A report that contains a number of sections should include a table of contents that lists the headings of each section and subsection with their corresponding page numbers.
