Workplace reports are written for a wide variety of purposes and can vary significantly in length, format, and style. In a technical context, these documents generally describe the process, progress, or results of technical or scientific research, recommend solutions to defined problems, or review the current state of a technical or scientific issue or design. They can be informational, analytical, and/or persuasive. Content, style, and structural elements will vary, depending on purpose, audience, and genre; however, they tend to follow similar conventions and formats that help readers digest the content quickly and use the information strategically.

The box below contains a list of many types of reports. It’s not an exhaustive list, but if gives you a sense of the many reasons why people working in government agencies, companies, research organizations, and universities write reports. Consider what kinds of content and structures you might expect to find in the following common types of reports:

If you’d like to see specific examples, Queen’s University Library maintains several Technical Report Databases, where you can access a variety of reports on a range of topics.

Short vs Long Reports

The distinction between short and long reports is somewhat arbitrary, but here are some general guidelines to follow.

Note that these are guidelines, not “rules” and therefore, you can deviate from these guidelines if you have good reason. For example, if you have a dense 9 page report that you think would be more accessible and readable for your audience if it had an Executive Summary and Table of Contents, then include them. If you have a 12 page report that contains a lot of visual elements, but not much text, you may not need elaborate pre-matter.

Long Reports

Long reports tend to be one step in a series of documents related to a project, often beginning with a Proposal, and perhaps following one or more Progress Reports. The reports in this rather loosely defined category are variously called feasibility reports, recommendation reports, evaluation reports, assessment reports, etc. They all perform similar functions: they provide a careful study of a situation or problem, and often recommend what should be done to address the situation. Of the many kinds of reports listed above, we will focus here on Feasibility Studies and Recommendation Reports, as these are typical genres you might write in a university writing course and will certainly come across them in most workplaces.

Feasibility Studies

A feasibility study examines the viability, practicality and potential success of implementing a proposed initiative. It might study a situation (for example, a problem or opportunity) and a plan for doing something about it, in order to determine whether that plan is “feasible”—whether it is practical in terms of current technology, economics, time frame, social needs and preferences. The feasibility report answers the question “Should we implement Plan X?” by stating “yes,” “no,” or sometimes a “maybe” or “under certain conditions.” It offers a definitive analysis that identifies benefits, risks and potential obstacles to implementing the project, and clearly indicates whether or not it should go ahead, and under what conditions. Doing this kind of study allows decision makers to determine ahead of time if implementing the plan or project will be worth investing the time and resources necessary, and will have sufficient benefits or “return on investment.”

Not only does it indicate whether the idea is feasible, it also provides the data and the reasoning behind that determination, walking the reader through the investigative process and methodology. In some cases, a feasibility study might outline the reasons why the idea cannot or should not be implemented, or what obstacles must be overcome before the idea can become feasible. Typical feasibility criteria include

Technological Feasibility:  Is it technically possible? What is the current state-of-the-art? What materials, hardware, software, and/or specialized skills will be needed to make this possible?

Economic Feasibility: What will it cost to implement the plan? Will the benefits outweigh the costs, or be worth the costs it in terms of benefits to the community? Even if it falls within a reasonable budget, should we do it?  Will it have long term benefits that outweigh costs? Is there a less expensive or financially risky way to achieving the same result? How does it compare to the cost of doing nothing about this situation? What is the “return on investment?”

Legal and Regulatory Feasibility: does it follow all relevant laws, regulations, industry standards, and guidelines? For example, will the project meet minimum sustainability standards?

Social Feasibility: Will people support this idea? Could there be any opposition to it? How might this be addressed? Is there a need for community engagement and consultation? What might that look like? Is Market Analysis needed to determine sufficient demand or possible competition?

Practicality: Can the project be implemented within the prescribed time frame? Do we have the organizational structure to manage this project?

Accessibility: Can this project be implemented in a way that makes it accessible to users with various abilities? How well does it conform to the 7 Principles of Universal Design?

Other? Depending on what you are studying, you may find additional feasibility criteria and heuristics to use when assessing whether or not the project should go ahead.

Recommendation Reports

Where a Feasibility Study examines the viability of a single course of action, a Recommendation Report offers a comparative analysis. That is, it compares a selection of 2 or more alternative solutions to a problem, based on clearly stated criteria, and recommends the preferred course of action. Both kinds of reports will provide not only your final assessment, but also the data and analysis you used to get there. By “showing your work,” you allow readers to review your findings, test your logic, and examine your conclusions to make sure your methodology was sound and that they can agree with your final judgment. Your goal is to convince the reader to follow your recommendation by using careful research, detailed analysis, rhetorical style, and clear documentation. Since your reader will want to make an evidence-based decision, it is critical that all of your claims and recommendations are supported by sound research and evidence.

The typical structure of a recommendation report follows the problem-solving approach emphasized throughout this text. Before you present the solution alternatives, you must clearly and fully define the problem you are attempting to address, including why a solution is needed, the measurable objectives that any solution should try to achieve, and the constraints that any viable solution must abide by. This allows the reader to keep these evaluation criteria in mind as they read your solution descriptions and comparative analysis.

The way the report is organized walks the reader systematically through your process of analysis and evaluation. The structure outlined below offers guidelines on the kinds of content you may need to include and overall structure, but please note that these are not suggested headings for your document; your headings should more concretely indicate the specific content of your report by incorporating key words and ideas from each section. Each section outlined below may require sub-sections to fully and coherently develop ideas.

More information about key elements you should include is outlined below.

The Executive Summary

An Executive Summary (ES), like an abstract at the beginning of a scholarly article, offers a concise yet comprehensive summary of the report that follows. This genre allows the “busy executive” or decision maker to quickly get a sense of what your report entails, and determine if they want to read the whole report, read parts of it, or pass it along to someone else who may find the information more valuable or relevant, or who needs to make a decision based on its contents.

Your goal in writing this summary is to get the audience interested in reading the whole report. Therefore, it is much more than a T.L.D.R. version of your report; it has a clear rhetorical purpose: you want to get the reader interested in learning more about your proposed idea, so you need to include the most important and persuasive parts of your report in your summary. For this reason, the ES is probably the last part of the report that you write, and potentially the most important.

LENGTH:  The length of an Executive Summary will vary depending on the context. General guidelines suggest that an ES should be roughly 5-10% of the length of your report, or 1-2 pages in most cases. Reports that are hundreds of pages long will have much longer executive summaries.

FORMAT: Use the conventional heading, Executive Summary, in large bold font (sometimes in ALL CAPS), either left aligned or centred at the top of the page. The ES should appear directly after your Table of Contents and before your Introduction. It should be self-contained; that is, nothing else should appear on the page(s) that contain your ES. They are typically singe spaced, and occasionally use a two column format if they fit on a single page. Some are written simply as a series of paragraphs; others make use of headings and other visual markers. Here are some examples that show a variety of ES formats:

Multipolarization: Munich Security Report 2025 contains a 3 page (pp. 9-11) ES written using a simple multi-paragraph format. The full report is 121 pages, plus appendices.

Oxfam’s 2025 Climate Plunder report (61 pages, plus notes) has an Executive Summary that goes from page 4 – 11 and contains graphics, pull quotes, and numbered lists.

The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report on Impacts, Adaptations and Vulnerabilities related to climate change contains two summaries:  a “Summary for Policy Makers” and a “Technical Summary,” showing an understanding of the needs of different audiences.

Comparative Analysis

A key element of a recommendation report is the comparative analysis.  Remember that you include this section so that readers can follow the logic of your analysis and see how you came to conclusions. They may even come to different conclusions if they have additional information about the problem requirements and goals that you may lack.

Comparisons are typically structured using either a “block” (whole-to-whole) approach, or an “alternating” (point-by-point) approach, or sometimes a combination of the two.

You might compare 3 solution options (1, 2, and 3) using three criteria for comparison (A, B, and C).  If you were comparing tablets, you might use the point-by-point approach, having a section that compared all three options based on cost (criteria A), another section that compared their battery function (criteria B), and so on.

Each of these comparative structures should end with a conclusion that sums up the relative strengths and weaknesses of each option and indicates which option is the best choice in that particular category of comparison. Of course, it won’t always be easy to state a clear winner—you may have to qualify the conclusions in various ways, providing multiple conclusions for different conditions. (For more detail, see Appendix C: Writing Comparisons.)

Weighted Objectives Charts

A comparative analysis is often summarized and presented visually in a decision matrix of some kind. One of the most common is the Weighted Objectives Chart (WOC).

In order to evaluate the solution alternatives fairly and in an unbiased way, it is important to devise a way of evaluating the designs before you create or select them. The criteria that go into a WOC should be based directly on the objectives you defined in your problem definition, before proposing any solutions, and may include additional objectives that will help you measure the effectiveness and desirability of each solution alternative. Then, you build or chose the design alternatives to best fit these criteria. See Figure 7.6.1. for an example WOC (partially filled in) that compares 2 cars to see which one best meets the criteria of the problem.

Creating a weighted objectives chart entails several detailed steps:

Step 1 – Determine the Objectives: the objectives you use to evaluate the design alternatives should be based on the objectives stated in your problem definition. You may include additional objectives to fine tune your comparative analysis. Aim for a minimum of 5 objectives to create a robust set of evaluation criteria.

Step 2 – Determine the Weights: Place the objectives in order from most to least important, and assign each objective a weight, giving the most important objective the highest weight. The combined weights of all objectives should sum to a unity (1, 10, or 100).

Step 3 – Define Measurement Parameters: Create a scoring rubric for each objective, showing how you will assign a “grade” for how well each design meets that criteria. This is usually done using a Likert scale (scale of 1-5 or 1-10), with each score having a specific value or range of values. You will need to determine how you will measure and grade achievement of each objective. These can be quantitative (miles per gallon of fuel consumption) or qualitative (subjective experience of comfort), as seen in the scoring rubric sample below.

Once you have determined your objectives, ranked and weighted them, and created scoring rubrics for each one, you can place them all in a table that allows you to easily compare each solution. In the magnitude column, you would enter the actual price ($4299), fuel consumption, and comfort level. Under score, enter the score that specific magnitude gets in the objective scoring rubric (as in Table 7.6.1). To get the value, multiply your score by the weight. Adding all the values for each option will give you the overall utility value for each option, and show you which design best meets your objectives.

For example, if one possible purchase option had a sale price of $4299, you would enter that under the “magnitude;” that would receive a score of 2, based on the scoring rubric in Table 7.6.2; multiply 2 by the weight of 30, and the overall score for that objective is 60.

NOTE: the Weighted Objectives Chart presents a detailed visual summary of your comparative analysis; it does not replace it. You still need to include written explanations for how each design performed in relation to the evaluation criteria and how you tested the performance to arrive at the scores.

You can download a fully formatted, blank WOC template in Word here:  Weighted Objectives Chart Template