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A guide to report writing part III
Structure of a formal report

Siddique Hayat Khan

IN a way your internship report is different from other types of reports. Since you'll produce this report after having been involved with an organization, you are expected to introduce the organization where you've spent a substantial part of your academic life i.e. 12 long weeks. So, you can guess that your report will have a section called the organization part.

Recommended structure for the organizational part:

(a) Background when it was established
(b) Type of business it is in Banking, pharmaceutical manufacturing, RMG export, etc.
(c) Products/services it deals in different banking products, FMCG, etc.
(d) Organizational structure (BOD and Management)
(e) Number of branches in the country
(f) Mission and vision (SWAT analysis if possible)
(g) Financial statements (Income Statement, Balance Sheet, etc.)

Recommended structure for a formal report:

1. Title page
2. Letter of transmittal
3. Executive summary
4. Abbreviations
5. Table of contents
6. Origin of the report
7. Introduction/background
8. Objectives
9. Literature review
10. Methodology
11. Findings
12. Conclusion/recommendations and Limitations
13. Bibliography
14. Appendix

Description of the components:

1. The Title page is just the cover page that provides four basic pieces of information (i) the title (or topic) of the report, (ii) name of the intern (along with batch and ID), (iii) recipient of the report, and (iii) date of submission.

2. The letter of transmittal is nothing but a forwarding letter addressed to the person to whom you are to submit your report. Some institutions like IBA have an internship and placement office headed by a chairman, in which case you'll address the Chairman, Internship and Placement Program. In some universities this role is done by the Dean, School of Business.

3. Abbreviations/keywords: Although not mandatory, you may provide a list of abbreviations or keywords along with their full form and meanings, especially when you're using a lot of technical jargon.

4. The executive summary or abstract (also called the excerpt) is a gist of your whole report squeezed within no more than 2 pages. This will contain all main parts of your report from the objectives to the methodologies and findings. I know you are wondering how you'll express everything in such a short space. So attempt to write this only after you've completed the whole report. (more will be provided later on)

5. A well organized Table of contents helps readers in finding out the required items in the shortest possible time. To facilitate easy searching use page numbering and divide the report into easily identifiable sections. Use proper indenting to organize the table of contents.

6. The origin of the report is expressed in a short paragraph where you mention how the study was initiated as partial requirement of your BBA/MBA degree. Although not mandatory, some prefer to dedicate a small part called 'acknowledgement' where you'll acknowledge the contribution of the faculty advisor, supervisor, and others who had helped you during the study.

7. Introduction This will provide a brief introduction of the research topic.

8. Objectives: As mentioned in Part-I, identify the main objectives that will determine the course of the entire research study.

9. Literature review: Once you've set your objectives, it is imperative that you will go through the research works already done by your predecessors in this field. As an evidence of that, you'll write short review on some of those research works. Don't forget to include them in the bibliography. (more will be discussed later on)

10. Methodology: This part will be pretty big and descriptive. It will contain the design of your whole research study. The concepts that you've acquired from your Research Methodology course will be particularly useful at this stage. So, it's time you dust down your old notes and browse through the relevant chapters of the book. The type of your research will dictate the design of the research. For a hypothesis-testing research study, you'll begin with a hypothesis and will try to prove or disprove it (the hypothesis). For instance, you begin with a hypothesis 'there is a direct relationship between TV viewing and consumption of potato chips”. To prove/disprove this hypothesis you'll collect data on TV viewing and potato chip consumption from selected consumers. Some of the researches will be of causal type where you'll try to establish a cause-effect relationship between two variables, like the relationship between lending rates and volume of credit of a bank.

Most research studies for internship will be explorative or descriptive, where interns will attempt to explore the phenomenon like customer preferences or call habits of cell phone users. These are also known as Ex post facto research where you have no control over the variables; you only seek to measure them.

(a) Source(s) of data: Give full description on how data used in the study were obtained. If you're using secondary data from annual report or other publications of an organization then do mention that and include relevant pages of them in the appendix section. In case of primary data obtained by interviewing customers or employees show the data capture forms in the appendix part. Mention what sampling methods were used and why.

(b) Analyses of data: Describe the type of analyses, like correlation, regression, etc. that were carried out on the data.
(further discussion on methodology will be done later on)

11. Findings: Here you will show the outcomes of the study. You might have attempted to prove or disprove a hypothesis. Show the outputs in a visually pleasant and understandable form. Tabular forms of data are more easily comprehendible than data presented at random. Choose the appropriate type of graph to show the output. To show the market share of different products or deposit mix of a bank, pie charts would be most appropriate, while line charts are best suited to show the trend of a certain variable over the time. Use column charts to make comparison among products from different brands for several consecutive periods. (further discussion will be made later on)

12. Conclusion/recommendations: As mentioned in Part I, make recommendations that you can substantiate.

13. Appendix: You'll have lots of tables, graphs, financial statements and pictures; do not clutter the main body of your report with them. So send them to a separate section called the appendix that will be placed at the end of the report. When you have a large number of items divide the appendix into several parts. For instance, Appendix A for the financial statements, Appendix B for tables showing quarterly loan disbursements, and Appendix C for recovery of loans, and so on so forth. The appendix will come to no use unless you use proper reference into the main body.

14. Bibliography: This is where you show the sources of information you've used while writing the report. This includes the text books, articles, websites, etc. Use the most common bibliography format that you've learned in
your Business Communication Course.

(a) Books: author, title of book (underlined), publisher, year of publication. Example: Williams, Fredrick, The Communications Revolutions, Beverly Hills, Calif, Sage Publications, 1982.

(b) Articles: author, title of article (within quotes), name of journal (underlined), volume, no, page. Example: Swift, Martin, H., “Clear Writing Means Thinking Clear” Harvard Business Review, vol. 51, No. (January 2007), pp. 62-64.

(c) Websites: the URL followed by date and time when it was accessed.

Sr. Lecturer, University of Development (UODA)
(email: siddique0110@yahoo.com)