Clients
Transport Research
Customers, including car manufacturers, local councils and Transport for London, commission research from this organisation into road building materials, wheel arch design, attitudes towards safety belts and hundreds of other subjects.
Reports are the products that the customers see and pay large sums of money for, sometimes extremely long ones. The reputation of the research organisation therefore rests on the clarity and professionalism with which they can present their findings. Time is always short.
Quality control managers spent countless hours wading through poorly structured, semi-grammatical, inconsistent screeds. Texts often went through many iterations, testing tempers and deadlines to the limit and wasting time at senior levels.
Words Work runs a report writing course for recruits within their first year which consists of a day working on planning ahead, document structure and navigation, level of detail and the skill of summarising. A second session ten days later gets down to sentence structure and grammar at an individual level. This also provides a reminder of the learning points from the first day and an opportunity to ask questions that have arisen in the meantime.
There is now a common understanding of good practice. With this has come an appreciation of the importance of early planning, clear communication with the team not only about the project but also about the way the report will be presented. The problem has not gone away, but young recruits learn what they need to do to continue to improve their writing style and their management of long documents.