A long report is the culmination of many weeks of hard work. It differs from a short report in purpose, scope, format, and, many times, audience. A long report provides an in-depth view of an issue and may discuss not just one or two current events but a long history. It requires much more research than a short report does (although information gathered for a series of short reports may be used to prepare a long report). A long report is too detailed and complex to be adequately organized in a memo or letter format. It may take weeks or even months to write. The audience for a long report is generally broader and higher up in an organizations hierarchy than the audience for a short report. Finally, long reports are written collaboratively more often than short reports are.

The Process of Writing a Long Report

View writing a long report not as a series of isolated tasks but as an evolving project. Identify a broad yet significant topic for your report. Expect to confer regularly with your supervisor and to revise your work often. Your revisions may be extensive, depending on what your superior recommends; be sure to share all major changes with your supervisor. Keep the order flexible at first; a long report is not written in the order in which it will finally appear. Use both a calendar and a checklist to track your progress, checking off major parts of the report as you finish them.

Parts of a Long Report

A long report consists of front matter, the report text, and back matter. The front matter may include a letter of transmittal, a title page, a table of contents, a list of illustrations, and an abstract. The report text consists of an introduction, the body, a conclusion, and recommendations. The introduction includes background information, defines the problem the report addresses, and describes the reports purpose and scope. The body, or discussion, is the longest part, making up as much as 70 percent of the report. It should be carefully organized around a coherent, well-defined plan. The conclusion ties everything together by presenting your findings. The recommendations tell readers what should be done about the findings described in the conclusion. The back matter may include a glossary, a list of references, and one or more appendixes.

Documentation

Document any direct quotations, any paraphrase or summary of someones written work, any interpretations on conclusions expressed that are not your own, any statistical data you have not compiled yourself, or any visuals you did not prepare yourself. Do not document obvious facts, well-known dates, historical information, mathematical or chemical formulas, or proverbs.

Parenthetical Versus Footnote Documentation

Parenthetical documentation is the method advocated by the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the American Psychological Association (APA). In the parenthetical method, the writer tells readers right in the text what references are being cited. In MLA style, for example, the last name of a quoted or summarized author is added in parentheses right after the quote or summary of his or her work, together with the page numbers in the original source where that quote or information can be found. When a writer documents using footnotes or endnotes, by contrast, he or she inserts a superscript number after the quote or paraphrase and provides the bibliographic information in a correspondingly numbered footnote (at the bottom of the page) or endnote (in a list at the end of the paper).

Preparing the Works Cited Page

Even though the list of references goes at the end of your paper in parenthetical style, prepare your Works Cited list before you start to document. By preparing the list first, you will know what sources you must cite and what page numbers you must list, and you will avoid accidentally omitting a source.

When you prepare a Works Cited list in MLA style, include this information, in this order:

Books	Articles
Author(s) or editor(s)	Author(s)
Title (underscored or in italics)	Title of article (in quotation marks)
Edition (if second or subsequent)	Name of journal(underscored or in italics)
Place of publication
Publisher's name	Volume number (in arabic numerals)
Date of publication	Date of publication
	Page number(s)

The order and formatting vary slightly for APA style and for sources other than books and journal articles, such as edited collections, newspaper articles, TV shows, and papers presented at meetings. Refer to your textbook or to the official MLA and APA style guides for the correct format.