Write Your Report or Research Paper in Half the Time

Report writing is not everyone’s favorite activity. I get it — it’s tedious, and it takes a long time.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a victim of reports like me.

I’ve had to write countless reports in school and at work. I found a way to make it easier, and I want to share it with you.

By the end of this post, you’ll understand how to apply the SGCCC process to significantly shorten how much time you put into researching and writing a report.

I’m sharing it because I know it works. I went from spending 10+ hours on a 10-page research report to below 4 — quite a miracle, I know.

The 5-Step Process — SGCCC

Structure, gather & document, convert, cite, and check.

1 — Structure

Based on your report’s central purpose, create a list of topics. Then, under each topic, list the questions you want answered within that topic.

Having a structured, question-driven approach ensures your research will be targeted, so you can address the most important things.

Distinguish the questions you must answer — the must-haves from the nice-to-haves. Allocate your research time accordingly. Research the must-have topics first, and then if there’s extra space and time, go into the rest.

Your topics and subtopics should follow the principle central to consulting, MECE — Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive. That simply means: 1) there’s no overlap, 2) they cover everything you need to cover.

2 — Gather & Document

With what you need to find clearly laid out, you can smoothly transition into research.

This has two parts, 1) gather the information, 2) document.

When gathering information, I typically search several keywords related to a topic (on the internet and in databases), open and take a brief look at the relevant sources to get a big-picture idea of what information there is, and then go into filling out what’s laid out in my structure.

I’d do this in the order of importance, starting with the must-haves.

This process is much simpler now — all you need to do is match the information from the sources to your readily laid out questions.

Documentation is crucial here to save you time later.

Simply paste the link of each source you used into your working document and label them with the abbreviation of the source (ex. Statistics Canada = “SC”), then put this abbreviation at the very end of each block of information you extract from a source in your research document.

If you do this, making citations will feel like a piece of cake.

3 — Convert

Now you’ve addressed all the questions you needed to address with research from a variety of sources, and each piece of information is well-labeled with its source.

It’s finally time to turn your research material into a report. Just follow the topics you laid out and turn your research into full sentences, in your own words. Make any adjustments as you see fit.

I just want to stress one thing here — make sure the information flows. To make it easy for the reader to understand, make sure you’re integrating the research you got from various sources into a cohesive storyline. And leave the source abbreviations in for the in-text citations later.

4 — Cite

Now, simply put all your links into a citation tool (I use the Citation Machine), and put it into your bibliography.

Then for the in-text citations, change your abbreviations to their proper citations one source at a time. This shouldn’t take more than a few minutes because you already have the citations and the labels in place.

5 — Check

In this stage, you go over the report from top to bottom a final time before handing it over to whoever it’s for.

You can do this in any order you like, but here’s the process I follow:

1. Adjust formatting (font, headings, margins, etc.)
2. Run spell check (I recommend Grammarly)
3. Sense check the numbers (do they contradict? do they make sense?)

Then, do a careful final read-through, and export!

That’s it! You now know the 5-step process to write great reports, quickly.

Let’s recap this 5-step process or SGCCC:

1. Structure 2. Gather & document 3. Convert 4. Cite 5. Check

I recognize that when it comes to any piece of writing, we should prioritize quality over speed — and I’ve designed this process to be consistent with it.

The process you just learned should boost your efficiency and increase your writing’s quality at the same time.

From all those reports I wrote, I learned that where most time is wasted in report writing is from the lack of structure, prioritization, and documentation, and this process hopes to address all three issues for you while ensuring your citations will be more accurate, your checking more comprehensive, and prioritization easier.

Thanks for reading, I hope this helped, and happy report writing!