If you buy into the idea of writing reports in a more modular way – and I hope you will, there are many, many advantages to be gained from this approach. Here are just a few:
Increased readability
In a previous post, I mentioned how your readers will thank you if you start writing in shorter sentences. The same is true for writing reports in modular units or paragraphs. These shorter, better focused units are a pleasure for your audiences. You are only asking them to think about and process one idea at a time.
Going back a few years, Jakob Nielsen did some tests around this. He discovered that overall it was possible to increase readers’ ability to quickly skim read and comprehend a piece of text by a staggering 125%!
Increased ‘finadability’
I use ‘findability’ because if I use the word ‘accessibility’, people think I’m referring to issues for readers with some kind of disability. Increasing accessibility for such an audience is, of course, a no brainer. However, we seem to forget that making it easier for everyone to find a small piece of text within a bigger whole is also a no brainer.
How often have you spent ages wading through a long report trying to find a vital paragraph buried somewhere in the middle of page 176! As I suggested previously, dramatically increasing your use of meaningful headings reduces this kind of audience frustration to a minimum.
Keeps you on track
The biggest danger for any writer of pretty much anything is that they will lose the plot part way through; or get carried away and provide too much detail; or get bored and not provide enough detail for their intended audience.
There’s no better way to keep your report writing on track and avoid all the dangers just listed by writing short modular units. If you are thinking (and planning) modular the whole way through the writing process, it’s much harder to screw up.
Structuring and organising content is easier
If you are creating an outline structure using modular units of content, it makes the overall planning and structuring much easier. It also makes experimentation with and revision of that structure much easier, too.
This might sound counter-intuitive. After all, most writing processes teach a top-down approach. But if you start with a bunch of smaller units (identified through good audience analysis) it’s actually easier to build these smaller units into bigger wholes rather than the other way around. You’ll almost certainly get a more audience-focused result, too. Top-down structures are much more likely to be writer-focused.
Writing with colleagues is easier to manage
You may be one of the many people working with colleagues in a professional report writing capacity. If so, you are probably producing relatively long, complex pieces of content. This can often be a frustrating process for all parties concerned. How do you pull together the different bits of content that each person has written?
First of all, planning and writing in modular units makes it much easier to assign specific, targeted content to specific people. Second, pulling together those units into a meaningful sequence is also much easier . Finally, this approach provides more flexibility to experiment with alternative structures.
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