How to Write a School Report given by your teacher

Good report writing is an integral part of education.  With some basic guidelines, a well written report can be achieved.    

There are things you want to focus on when preparing a report:

• Follow the instructions
• Format the paper correctly
• Research
• Avoid plagiarism
• Citation
• Good spelling, grammar & punctuation
• Proofreading

Following the Instructions
The instruction section explaining how the teacher wants the report to be written is very important to the success of the final report.  This is where the teacher gives direction on what he/she wants the report writer to do.  For example, the instructions may contain type of report you are to write, the due date, the formatting of the paper, etc. Making sure that you understand the instructions is crucial to writing a good report. 

Formatting the Paper
Reports are very restricted by how they are formatted.  Content of reports varies from topic to topic, but the formatting has special rules, procedures, and expectations.  Two very popular formatting guidelines are
APA (American Psychological Association) &
the MLA (Modern Language Association).

The APA style of writing is usually used in science papers, such as biology, sociology, economics, psychology and more.  MLA style is more often used in reports in the humanities such as English and foreign languages and reports in the arts such as art history.  These formatting guidelines tell you how to do the title page, format the header and footer, how to quote someone else in your work, and how to properly give credit to that person you quoted as well.

A very good online resource for APA, and MLA is the Purdue OWL or Online Writing Lab.  The Purdue OWL is very user friendly and can guide you in formatting a successful report.  It gives a condensed but complete instruction on the various ways to format a paper. 

Another good online resource are the websites for APA (www.apastyle.org), and MLA (www.mla.org) themselves.

Research
When doing a report, some kind of research is necessary to support your ideas.  Whether your report is for science, English, social studies, or geography, you will want to have some research that gives your ideas weight.  By using research your report will help the reader understand how you came to the conclusions/ideas that you arrived at in your paper.

Avoiding Plagiarism
Plagiarism is something that every good writer should be wary about.  When you paraphrase (putting the ideas/words of someone else into your own words), summarize, copy word for word someone else’s ideas and words, you must give credit to that person otherwise you are plagiarizing.  Both MLA & APA have formatting guidelines for giving credit to whoever’s words/ideas you are borrowing. 

Citation
Since you’ve done research on your paper and you’ve used other people’s words, you must use proper citation techniques.  Again, these specific rules and guidelines are available through MLA & APA formatting information. 

Good Spelling, Grammar & Punctuation
In order to get any written message across, you must have good spelling, grammar and punctuation.  Whether the contents of your report are correct or not will be overshadowed by poor spelling, grammar and punctuation.  It is important, in order to write a clear, coherent report, that you have everything spelled correctly, all verbs are in the correct tense, you’ve used the correct punctuation for contractions, and so on.

Proofreading
No writer can deliver a good report without proofreading it several times.  If a writer doesn’t proofread his/her own paper, it is guaranteed that there will be mistakes.  As you become a proficient writer, you’ll naturally proofread your own work, but in order to write a good report, you and someone else must proofread your paper to make sure everything that was talked about earlier is well done.