ORGANIZING A REPORT

Set forth in the next dozen pages of this manual is the thesis-and-subheaded-structured-segments organization pattern, the standard and most unmisunderstandable organization for use in business reports. What it does is to have you set out the parts of your argument in a systematic way and to let your reader know how you’ve done it so it will be easy to follow.

In three sentences, the “thesis-and-subheaded-structured-segments” pattern looks like this:

Image The first paragraph states the thesis in such a way that the reader can tell (1) what the rest of the report will say and (2) in what order the material will be presented.

Then ...

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