constructing an informational report.

This exercise functions as a first step toward developing a business plan/business report. Your team will use this report at a later stage in your team writing. The goal of this exercise is to collect and process your research findings for your team and to think about the format of informational reports.

This will be based on your reading Lesson 7 and your research this week.

Goals

By completing this exercise, you will practice

1. Defining and selecting the components of an informational report
2. Composing an informational report

These goals align with the following module level goals

3. identify key features of informational reports and other project management documents (either memos, minutes, or progress reports) [CG]
4. write an informational report and either of the above project management documents [CG]

Task

In this writing exercise you are asked to construct an informational report in the form of a business letter. You should gather, process, and relay a summary of the information about the background of your team’s business idea. You should construct this report

• formally, based on your knowledge of business letters
• for content, based on the general requirements of informational reports relayed in Lesson 7.

As explained in the Learning Activity 7 instructions, in your team meeting this week, you figured out how to share the research and you were given an area/topic of research related to your team’s idea. Then, you went and conducted research on your own. You will use this informational report to report back on your findings to your instructor and your group. Then, in a couple of weeks, your team will use this information to construct larger, more complex documents, but for now, you just have to present your findings from your individually done research. This means that you do not have to involve the other team members’ results in your report.

Completion

You should construct your message as real business letter, which means that the letter should include all headings, date, greetings, and any other components of a business letter.

Format and required parts:

Students Safe

Due to the crime activity around Temple University’s campus students should feel safe. Temple University should have an app called Students Safe. Once you sign on the app it will show you a location of an officer, either in a car or on a bike. So you would know where it’s safe to walk or the location of a cop right away. The app will also have a listing of daily crimes

Informational reports are done in many different formats dictated by the purpose, the reader, and company or industry standards. In this exercise, you are asked to formulate your report as a business letter addressed to your instructor. This means that headings, greeting, and closing are necessary.

Construct the document of 600+ words with the following components:

1. Business letter heading and other letter gestures (Pay attention to formatting!)
2. Opening paragraph 1 (brief and concise)

• purpose of the report
• brief summary of the findings
• explanation of the organization

3. Body paragraphs 3-5

• detailed discussion of the findings
• research information should be summarized and/or paraphrased and cited in MLA format
• organized based on the nature of information (see Lesson 7, slide 11)

4. Closing section

• brief conclusion
• references in MLA format on the next page (include your research sources) [Note: There are no particular guides for how to include Works Cited in a business letter, so just please enter an MLA formatted Works Cited on the page following the closing of the letter.

Evaluation

Your submission will be evaluated based on how closely it reflects

• professional tone and format,
• objective delivery,
• substantive research results, and
• standard American English.

Your research can be addressing any of the following topics:

• Historical background (What event/s lead to the development of this industry, type of product, etc. Don’t think of the grand history of human kind, only the segment of the past that is relevant to describe the problem and existing solutions.)
• Regional background (Where do you find examples for this type of product, industry, service, etc.) This can be regional, nationwide, or global.
• Existing models

1. Problem (What is the problem that your idea—product, organization, service—is trying to solve? Do you know similar problems that already have solutions?)
2. Solutions (What type or specific solutions—products, services, industry—exist already? You might know some products that aim to solve this or a related/similar problem.)

• Demographic (Who are the potential users of products, services like this? What segment of the population are you aiming to target/serve with your idea?)
• Or other. (Your particular idea may dictate a different type of look at the background.)

Note that these areas of discussion fully or partly match up with the organizational scheme of informational reports mentioned in Lesson 7, so your report should be arranged with one of those schemes in mind. Make sure that you bring the sources into connection with each other and not just present them one by one.

Example

So, for example, if I look at the idea of creating a new app for people with prosthetic hands to operate mobile devices, I would look at what sort of other apps exist out there that serve similar purposes as mine (model), who are the users for this type of apps (demographic, geographic), where are these apps used, what purposes do they serve, what differences might I see between these products (comparison), how did the apps industry develop and what are the industry standards now (historical, but go back only as far as the types of apps or apps in general and not the whole cell phone industry’s history) for such products. All of this information serves the purpose of finding out about the viability and necessity of a product like mine later down the line. The information I’d collect here will be useful for my later analysis and proposal. Note that each of these areas of exploration are going to dictate the organization of their presentation in the informational report.

Requirements:

• You should find at least 2-3 sources on your given topic/area of research.