Hi, I'm Vivien, and welcome to my video about writing the body of your business report for ANU. 


When you're writing the body of your report, it provides the justification for your overall key message. It presents the findings and the evidence, as well as using effective paragraphing techniques to show your analysis to back up that key message that you make. 


Now, when you're writing the body of the report, you might find that you go over the word limit, so make sure that you keep your discussion very concise by using appendices wisely. Always double-check with the lecturer as to whether they will let you use appendices; some lecturers prefer you not to, so make sure that you ask first. 


Always think about how to precisely and concisely present your analysis in support of your key message, and we're going to have a look at how to do that. First of all, when you do organize the body of your report, break it into major points. Think about the sections of your report and the subsections, and then each of those subsections will be broken again into paragraphs. A report is made up of a collection of paragraphs, and I'm going to be focusing on paragraphing because we talked about organizing your report by your topic sentences earlier on. In that video, we were talking about topic sentences as showing the key message of your argument. These topic sentences can really help you show your outline and help you to keep on track in terms of your individual paragraphs. 


If you think about a paragraph as a burger, it has three main elements: the top piece of bread (the bun) is your topic sentence. Your topic sentence states the main idea of that paragraph, as well as the overall key message of the whole report. It explains how that paragraph's focus relates to that key message that you're making, whether or not somebody should invest, or whether there are particular recommendations that you're making to improve a company's performance, for example. 


A paragraph will then include the supporting sentences, which make up the evidence and the analysis that you provide to support your main message. It supports the key message that you've identified in that topic sentence. Then, paragraphs will usually contain a concluding or linking sentence at the end, which summarizes how that paragraph has advanced your main argument and what that paragraph has been about. It can also explain how that paragraph connects to the following paragraph. 


Think of your paragraphs as being one main idea each. They're usually 150 to 200 words each; if they get longer, they start to get a bit more confusing. Keep them short, but make sure that they aren't just the evidence and analysis. Make sure that they do also have the topic sentence and the concluding sentence. 


A sample paragraph here is taken from a student's essay, and we're going to walk through step by step what this paragraph does. First of all, let's look at the topic sentence. The main idea is captured in blue here, so you can see in this paragraph that they're talking about the targeted marketing of ABC recruitment services. This paragraph is really focusing on the marketing of recruitment services, and their key message is that the marketing will help to improve the company's performance. It relates back to that recommendation that they're making. Then, you can see the evidence and the analysis that they're using. The evidence here in the dark blue is talking about what kind of facts and figures they've found to support their key message. 


The analysis is the student's own interpretation of that evidence. They're not only presenting the facts (explaining, for instance, that the value of 0.77 for ABC recruitment for the month of August) but also saying that, based on their analysis, that value suggests a reasonable performance for a newly established business. Then, their analysis goes on to talk about the problems that the company is having. A return on assets of 0.63 percent (that evidence backed up by the figure) shows the entity has not sufficiently used its assets to generate revenue. 


All of this then leads them to go on to talk about prepaid advertising. You can see here that they've included a reference to an academic source and how that might be helpful to improve the company's performance. That targeted marketing idea is being presented to help them work on the problems with the return on equity and the return on assets. Their final sentence captures that key message: ABC recruitment should capitalize on a niche market by using specialists in placements for senior IT/NT professionals. This captures that key message that they're presenting overall.


In your evidence, which you're using in the paragraph, that can be made up of your analysis, the data, the computations that you've made, as well as the academic sources that you've consulted. All of that can be counted as supporting evidence. It could be that you're provided that evidence from your lecturer. Your lecturer might give you a scenario, particular reports to focus on, or particular data sets to focus on. They might also expect you to go out and do some research of your own, where you consult academic journal articles or might even be responsible for finding the industry reports to analyze those data sets in your work. 


As I said in a previous video, make sure that the types of academic sources that you use are reliable, and check out the ANU Library's advice on evaluating sources to help you find good sources to use in your work. Your analysis is worth thinking about in terms of how best to present your results concisely and fit into the word count. What's going to be easy and clear for your reader to understand? Is it percentages, tables, ratios, charts, and so on? Make it clear where that data came from as well—whether it came from the course material or from an external or other source. Give references for material that your lecturer has not provided you. 


If you're using formulas and long calculations and other data that you don't think are capturing the key idea that needs to be included in the body of the report, but you still want to show it, you can put those in appendices. Double-check with your lecturer as to whether they want to see appendices. If you have extra information that you don't think fits the main purpose of the report, but you still think is useful, you might be able to put it in an appendix. Make sure that you refer to that appendix in the text to say "See Appendix A for explanations or for the raw analysis." 


Looking at the evidence section of a paragraph, you might have noticed in the example that those values and the return on asset values weren't referenced, and that's okay because that was material supplied by the lecturer. The academic article they used (the French Adele article) is referenced because that's an external source they used, and that's by somebody else; it's not something that the lecturer wrote themselves. Think carefully about how you're going to incorporate the academic sources into your writing and make sure that you're familiar with the referencing standards. There are different types to incorporate sources. 


There's quoting, where you quote exactly what somebody has said, using quotation marks as well as a reference. Then there's paraphrasing, where you're taking a specific piece of information and putting it in your own words. That will also need a reference. Summarizing is where you put a key idea in your own words, but the difference is that you're summarizing the whole point or the main idea of somebody else's piece of work. That's the difference between a paraphrase and a summary. A paraphrase is more specific, and a summary captures the main idea of the point of the article. Both of them need references and are written in your own words. 


Then there's synthesizing, where you're saying many people have looked at this particular idea. That's again in your own words, but you might provide multiple references within that same reference. Make sure that you're familiar with the referencing styles, and you can check out our information on referencing and using sources to find out more about how to appropriately use sources in your work.


In sum, when you're organizing the body of the report, break it into major points and use subsections as well to help you identify how many paragraphs you're going to have. In that planning process and in that writing process, think about how you're going to wrap up the report and how you're going to edit it. That's what our following video is going to be talking about.