Report Writing

Design and formatting

Check the criteria

For academic assignments, check the marking criteria before investing too much time in designing and formatting your report. If elements such as: ‘Effective design and formatting’ are not allocated to assessment criteria, then don’t be too carried away by design aspects.

Make sure that your design doesn’t negatively impact on readability or accessibility. However, a report can seem more authoritative if formatted appropriately, and this may therefore contribute to its overall impact.

Help with formatting

For quick and easy design implementation, it can be simplest to pick an existing template from software. For example, when creating a new document in Microsoft Word, you can search for templates for reports.

Also see Digital Skills | Word for useful courses on formatting documents such as how to:

• Tidy up the fonts and formats throughout a document
• Create formatting styles for headings and titles
• Lay out with columns, page breaks and section breaks
• Add landscape pages for example to include large tables
• Add headers, footers and page numbers
• Create a ‘Table of Contents’ using headings in the style picker

Design examples

In addition, for some inspiration you can view the examples below, and consider aspects such as use of images, fonts, and white space. See if you can also find some more relevant examples which are similar to the one you intend to create.