Group Report Writing

• All team members should set their computer defaults to the same for all these aspects:

• Spellchecker – but see some detailed discussion below.
• Margins – these are affected by paper size: US computers select 8.5 by 11 and European computers select A4; the team should all adopt the same.
• Bullet point hierarchy (which dots and/or squares appear when different bullet tabs are used) – most easily left at default settings which should be the same for all.
• Font and point size – Arial is effective for ease of reading, Times for compactness; body text is most acceptable in 12 point. The font and text should be agreed from the beginning, and all sections should be submitted to the guardian of the master copy in this chosen style.
• Tabs – tabs should always be used in preference to a series of taps on the space bar – these leave confusion in the spacing.
• Hard page breaks should be inserted between appropriate sections instead of repeated hits on the Return key. Hard page breaks are done by Control-Enter.
• To keep tables together, select the table caption, and all the rows except the last one (or the last footnote if there are footnotes) and then do Format / Paragraph / Line and Page Breaks, and tick the 'Keep with next' box.
• Team members should agree not to use & for and, and agree which of eg or E.g. or e.g. to use as for example.
• Team members should agree on the capitalisation style for headings (all capitals, title case, or sentence case).
• Justification – choose left or right-left by choice, but just agree to be the same.

• Format of final report – it is very helpful to agree at an early stage the section headings and hierarchy of the final report. Thus members can send (for example) Section 4.3.2 date 23^rd April to replace Section 4.3.2 date 21^st April, and it is absolutely clear what to do with it. The guardian of the master copy must update the report immediately and re-circulate it.
• Early agreement of the report format helps the team to agree research methodology and offers the opportunity for the client to manage her/his expectations. A client may well change the emphasis when she/he sees the expected layout, and this affects the way the project will be done.
• Footnotes, headers and footers, endnotes and comments have separate language control, so they need to be standardised in addition to the main body of text.
• A lot of the problems with formatting are much easier to deal with if the default formatting is set up properly using Word 'styles' correctly in the first place.  Learning how to use the styles properly is a non-trivial investment (it needs quite a bit more effort than getting to grips with tracking, for example), but once done it makes the whole issue of formatting much easier to deal with.  Styles are easier to manage in Word 97 than in Word XP.  Once a document is set up properly in this way, any global changes to formatting can be done in one edit (to the master style), rather than going through the whole document and editing each affected paragraph.  The whole appearance of the document can be changed by appending a new set of styles (eg to change from single to double spacing on a temporary basis).

• If team members do not send text in the right format, the guardian has to act.
• Spellchecker follows a section of text and a wrong dictionary selection can be very hard to purge, although it is possible. See below for more on this.
• Rogue bullet points can be reset by cutting and pasting the text points into a part of the report where the chosen bullet point format is already established, but it is likely that each bullet will need to be redone separately. It is very laborious.
• Fonts etc can be changed by blocking and resetting from the toolbar, but this can often leave traces which make sections of text suddenly jump back to the former font – this is very frustrating and can be avoided by use of agreed settings from day 1.
• To avoid these jumping back events, team members should all open the file from the icon for the file instead of first opening Word and then asking Word to open the file; if the master document is sent as a Word attachment, the server places it into an in-tray for attached files. Open the in-tray and double click the icon, and work from there.
• If all else fails in removing rogue formatting, cut and paste the section into a regular email, and (almost) all the formatting is left behind. Cut and paste the text back from the email to your document (without ever sending the email of course).
• Use of the Track Change function (under Tools on the toolbar) can be very helpful at all stages; all team members need to know how to use this effectively. One pitfall is the loss of spacing, however careful the editing; fortunately spellchecker will show you immediately after removal of track changes where a space has been lost.
• Either as a result of Track Changes, or because of an author’s choice, the report may contain a number of double spaces between sentences. These can and should all be removed (use the Edit – Replace function and in the first box put two spaces and the second put one – there is nothing to see, but it works).

• It is essential that one team member is guardian of the master copy as the report develops, and that this member is a good communicator, willing to make prompt updates and re-circulate the report regularly, possibly daily.
• A numbering system for versions must be agreed and adhered to. An effective way is XYZ report 23 April 5pm AB (XYZ is the client name and AB the initials of the last author).
• It is also helpful to have the version number and date as a header in the report version, thus it is visible on every page (sometimes you will have two versions available at the same time, and you must be sure to work on the most recent version to avoid frustration and mistakes).
• Book publishers require editors to use a special system for marking headings, which uses the $ (dollar sign). Eventually all the dollar codes are replaced with section numbers (for example 4.3.2) and this is done on final edit (not by the author). Using a system like this avoids the problem of Word trying to add its own hierarchy to your titles. Word is very poorly designed for managing large documents and other programmes (for example Lotus manuscript) did a much better job, but are not generally in use now. The best recommendation I can make is that you set out the headings in the numbering system, point size and colour that you are going to use in the final document but precede each one in the working document with a search string in regular text (for example &&&) – this prevents Word from unhelpfully correcting your work, and allows easy removal at the end (use the edit-replace function and replace &&& with nothing at all).
• Recent (2002 onwards) versions of Word have facilities where notes can be left for co-workers, within the document version. If everyone has this type of facility then its use should be encouraged.

• Each section can be reviewed and challenged by another team member for factual correctness and ease of understanding. It is helpful to work in pairs for this and to review as soon as sections are in first draft.
• Dereplication can be done with the section reviews, but it is likely that the final edit of the whole document will reveal a lot of repeats. The final editor must carry the trust of the team to dereplicate effectively. It is very time-consuming, and proper resources (time, energy) must be allocated to it.

The purpose of a report is to communicate and thus it must be unambiguous and easy to understand.

• Ask your challenger to mark any sentence she or he had to read twice to understand, and then find a clearer way to write it.
• Use a mixture of shorter and longer sentences to make the document flow more easily.
• Avoid crunchy and backwards sentences, which might be poetic, but which are hard to read logically.
• Where possible, use the simpler word, such as start rather than commence.
• Ask someone not involved in the project to review your work for sense.
• Wherever possible, use tables, charts etc to help the reader visualise the findings. These reduce the problems of different styles from different authors.
• Use colour in the printing and use coloured paper and tabs if they help the reader.

• It is usually better to have a shorter report with a lot of Appendices, and this strategy is helpful if there are several authors. Different team members can take responsibility for different appendices without conflict of style – for example one can do the glossary, one can do the definitions.
• Most reports will carry an executive summary, and some or most readers will only refer to this section. It is therefore the most important section of the report and must truly reflect the work done and the results. It can be helpful to thrash the key points for this section out in a group meeting, so that they can be sorted into an order agreed by the group. Probably the biggest benefit of group authoring is an excellent executive summary.

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