We hope that you had a relaxing and happy holiday season, filled with fun, family, and friends. SourceAid will be participating in the ALA Midwinter Meeting, a renowned library conference in San Antonio, Texas, at the end of this month. If your school will also be attending, please be sure to visit us at booth 375. This month's article discusses ways to bolster your report's overall effectiveness.

How to Make the Most of Your Reports
"Techniques for a More Inviting, Informative, and Understandable Report"
By Julia Johns, SVP of Development

Present your research findings more effectively by making your report more inviting, informative, and understandable. For a preview of the techniques that you can use, refer to the Report Writing Techniques table shown below.

Inviting
Your report's appearance does not necessarily define the value of the information it contains. Nevertheless, your audience may feel more inclined to read your report if its purpose and contents are made self evident through techniques such as those outlined in the list below.

Title
Readers should not have to scan the report's contents to figure out its subject. If it is work for them to identify its subject, then the document will appear to be less informative and, in turn, less appealing to read.

Table of contents
Include a table of contents if your document is lengthy (about 12 pages or more). A table of contents provides a detailed preview of the document and allows readers to locate the section that is most relevant to them in less time. An index marking the page numbers of keywords, rather than sections, is also a worthwhile way to make a long report more usable, and therefore more inviting, to any audience.

Introduction
An introduction helps readers to understand the reason for the report and provide a preview of its contents. Explain the report's pertinent background information and purpose before you communicate any details so that your reader can understand the significance of the details that follow in the rest of the report. Do not hesitate to include a thesis statement as a succinct preview of the main points.

Informative
Once you convince your audience to read your document with an inviting first impression, you can effectively inform your audience by increasing its readability with the methods outlined in the list below.

Headings
If used correctly, headings can save time, minimize confusion, and inform the readers about the paragraph's significance relative to other paragraphs. Headings save busy readers' time by telling them what a paragraph is about before they even read it. The headings should be parallel, or consistent in their grammatical structure, to make the document less confusing and more readable. By using the same font styles for headings at the same level in the importance hierarchy, you can indirectly inform the reader as to whether the paragraph represents an entire main point of the paper or whether it contains information supporting a main point. Using the same font colors for headings within each section can help the reader to remember what section they are reading.

Signal phrases
In addition to using appropriate headings to inform your readers about paragraph contents, you can also use signal phrases. Signal phrases, such as "lastly" and "finally", can subtly notify the reader that they are nearing the end of the paragraph, the section, or the paper. Phrases like "furthermore", "also", and "as well as" indicate that the next point is closely related to the previous point.

Transitions
Transitions, or connective phrases, keep your readers informed in a way that is similar to the signal phrases described in the previous paragraph. Transitional phrases can reinforce points that you have already made. Examples of phrases that review previous points include "Not only is [previous point] significant, but [new point] is also ..." and "In addition to [old point], ..."

Using transitions between paragraphs can also inform the reader of what they are about to read or see. Examples of transitional phrases that introduce the reader to what follows include "...as you can see in the following illustration," and "...outlined in the table below". Always use a transitional phrase to introduce a reader to a visual aid, such as a chart, graph, or map. Do not assume that the reader understands the point that the visual aid conveys; the visual is worthless to someone who misinterprets it.

Visual aids
While signal phrases and transition phrases convey information about the relationship among facts, visual aids can communicate facts themselves. They are advantageous to include because some of your audience may be visual/spatial, rather than verbal/linguistic, learners and may learn from your report more easily if you cater to their learning preferences with graphs, charts, illustrations, and the like. To make your visual aid as informative as possible, keep the following points in mind.

1. Transitions and captions
   As the 'aid' in the term 'visual aid' suggests, the visual should supplement, not replace, the facts-- do not forget to explain its purpose. A one or two sentence caption explaining the visual in a sentence or two can be helpful to readers who are too busy to read your paper thoroughly.

2. Titles
   Even if there is a transition sentence that introduces the visual, you still need to give it a title and a figure number (if applicable). Keep in mind that the writing style you are using may prescribe a particular format to use to title your tables and figures.

3. Formatting
   If you paste a visual into your document, you may need to resize it to fit your document. Make sure that it has a title, a key (if applicable), clearly labeled units, and proper alignment. If you forget these details it could make your document look sloppy, giving your reader reason to be suspicious that you may have been similarly sloppy with your research.

4. References
   Do not forget to cite your source for the picture or data. Give credit where credit is due!

Tables
Tables, like visual aids, convey information to those readers who do not have the patience to read full paragraphs. You can optimize the effect of your tables on your readers by using colors or row or column highlights to increase readability, bolding heading font, and thicker borders around cells with headings. Do not mix and match quantitative data with qualitative information.

Lists
Informative lists may be used instead of tables when you have many items that fall into a single category and when the descriptions for each item cannot be succinctly stated in a single cell of the table. Distinguish lists from the body of the text by indenting them and bolding list items to separate them from the descriptions.

Understandable
Make sure your audience understands your information with the methods outlined in the list below.

Terminology
If you initially write a report for your peers, reword it as needed before you pass it on for a new audience. Your peers probably speak the same trade lingo as you do, but you may need to either increase or decrease technical terms or slang words depending on whether the paper is being passed on to stockholders, the media, or a professor.

Definitions
If you choose to include technical terms in your document that may be foreign to your reader, save your readers the time of looking up terms in encyclopedia or dictionary by defining the word in the right context for them.

Conclusion
Although the reader should be able to understand the overarching conclusion of the report by having read your document, include a conclusion anyway. Readers who do not care to read the facts behind your plans for action might skip ahead to the conclusion to see just a review of the facts and your proposal that results from data collection and analysis. It is imperative, therefore, to include a conclusion rather than leaving the audience to make interpretations about what will come in the future as a result of your research.

Conclusion
If you already have the content for a useful report, earn your work the attention it deserves by conveying your information in a way that is inviting, informative, and understandable. To make your report more inviting to a potential reader, be sure to give it a name, a table of contents (if the report is long), and an introduction. For a more informative report, you can incorporate techniques such as headings, transitions, signal phrases, visual aids, tables and lists. You can increase the chance that your reader thoroughly understands your writing by using the appropriate lingo, defining terms they might not know, and by adding a conclusion that emphasizes what you want the reader to most remember.

Internet Citations
By Sarah Keller, English Team Director

The most common complaint that students struggling with proper citation have involves internet sources; many students feel that creating internet citations enters them into a kind of "gray zone" because they are unaware of how to properly cite websites, internet books, and articles.

Standard citation certainly seemed complicated enough before it was possible to get seemingly limitless amounts of information at the click of a mouse, and while the internet is undoubtedly an amazing tool and resource, it has contributed to the rise of plagiarism because students often feel that it is easier to copy and paste chunks of information from websites into papers than to cite the sites accurately. SourceAid has been working to combat this through its easy to use software, making sure that students can input all the necessary data required to cite a website and create the proper citation. One way that SourceAid now facilitates the connection between internet citation and internet research is through the use of "active links". Whenever a student creates an internet citation, Citation Builder includes a link to the page they are using for quick referencing.