COM 220 Module 7 Business Reports Example

Answer First: Rewriting a Quarterly Property Report So Owners Can Read It in Two Minutes

Student Name

Business Administration Program, Aspen University

COM 220: Management Communication

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Answer First: Rewriting a Quarterly Property Report So Owners Can Read It in Two Minutes

Every quarter, Tasha Greene sends the owners of her nine Tampa communities a report on performance. The report she inherited from her predecessor runs fourteen pages. It opens with two pages on the Tampa rental market, moves through each community in alphabetical order with a pie chart of unit mix and expenses, and reaches the quarter's most important finding, that resident renewals at Bay Crest and Palm Hollow fell below 45%, on page eleven. Two owners have told Tasha they skim it. This paper explains how she will rewrite it.

The Reader

The owners are investors who receive reports from several managers. They want to know three things quickly: whether their properties are on track, what has changed and whether anything needs their decision. They are comfortable with numbers but have little time. The report should serve those needs in its first page.

Answer First

Minto (2009) developed the pyramid principle for business writing. Readers, she argued, understand ideas most easily when the main point, the governing thought, comes first and the supporting ideas are grouped beneath it, each group summarizing the ideas below it. Ideas at each level should be logically related, either as a sequence of reasons or as a set of similar points. The introduction should orient the reader by describing the situation, the complication that creates a question and the question the document answers, and then give the answer.

For Tasha's report, the situation is that the region is performing above budget overall. The complication is that renewals at two communities have fallen. The question is what is being done. The answer comes in the first sentence: "The region beat its budget this quarter, but renewals at Bay Crest and Palm Hollow fell below 45%, and we are changing how those communities handle renewals."

Before and After

Plain Words

Oppenheimer (2006) conducted experiments in which participants read texts such as graduate school admission essays and dissertation abstracts in original and modified versions. When words were replaced with longer, more complex synonyms, readers judged the authors as less intelligent, not more. The effect came from the reduced fluency of reading: harder text was attributed to a less capable writer. Simplifying already complex text made authors seem more intelligent.

The old report was full of phrases meant to sound professional, such as "we continue to facilitate optimization of resident engagement initiatives." The new report says what happened: "We called every resident whose lease ends in the next ninety days."

Charts Readers Can Read

Cleveland and McGill (1984) studied graphical perception, the visual decoding of information in graphs. In experiments, they asked people to judge quantities shown in different ways and ranked the elementary perceptual tasks by accuracy. Position along a common scale was most accurate, followed by position along nonaligned scales, then length, angle and slope, then area, volume and color. They recommended designing graphs that use the more accurate tasks.

Pie charts require judgments of angle and area, which are less accurate. The new report replaces the twelve pie charts with two dot charts. One shows renewal rates for all nine communities on a common scale, with the target marked. The other shows occupancy for each community this quarter and last.

The One-Page Summary

The summary has three findings, each a sentence with a number: the region beat its net operating income budget by 3.1%; occupancy rose to 95.4%; renewals at Bay Crest and Palm Hollow fell to 43% and 44%. It then lists the actions taken and one item for the owners' attention: the kitchen renovation request from Module 6.

Headings That Say Something

In the old report, headings were community names: "Bay Crest," "Cypress Point," "Palm Hollow." A reader skimming them learned nothing. In the new report, each heading states a finding, such as "Bay Crest renewals fell to 43% after two maintenance staff left" or "Cypress Point occupancy held at 97% for the third quarter." Following Minto, each heading summarizes the paragraphs beneath it, so an owner who reads only the headings still gets the report's argument.

Ordering the Communities

Alphabetical order treated every community as equally urgent. The new report orders them by how much attention they need: the two communities with falling renewals first, then any community missing budget, then the rest briefly. An owner who stops reading after page two will have read about every problem.

What Moves to the Appendix

Unit mix, expense detail by line item and the market survey still matter to the asset managers, who use them for their own models. They move to an appendix with plain tables, where they are available but no longer stand between owners and the findings.

Testing the Draft

Before sending, Tasha will give the new report to Rob Delgado, who has not seen the data, and ask him to tell her in two minutes what the report says and what it asks of owners. If he cannot, the summary needs work.

A Template for Future Reports

Tasha will use the same structure every quarter, so owners know where to look. The template fixes the order of the summary, the problem sections and the community sections, sets a limit of five pages before the appendix and lists the two charts that always appear. Each quarter, she will ask one owner for a sentence of feedback on whether the report gave them what they needed, and adjust the template once a year rather than every quarter, so the format stays familiar.

Conclusion

Minto's pyramid puts the answer where owners will see it, Oppenheimer shows that plain words make Tasha seem more capable, and Cleveland and McGill show that dot charts beat pie charts for accuracy. A one-page summary with findings first turns a report owners skimmed into one they can use.

References

Cleveland, W. S., & McGill, R. (1984). Graphical perception: Theory, experimentation, and application to the development of graphical methods. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 79(387), 531-554. https://doi.org/10.1080/01621459.1984.10478080

Minto, B. (2009). The pyramid principle: Logic in writing and thinking (3rd ed.). Pearson Education.

Oppenheimer, D. M. (2006). Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: Problems with using long words needlessly. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20(2), 139-156. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1178