The Individual Short Report

INDIVIDUAL SHORT REPORT

The Individual Short Report (ISR) connects to the Group Proposal Assignment, which is the final major assignment of the semester. The GPA asks you to write a proposal argument to a client (non-profit or for-profit company) recommending a new marketing strategy. To write a proposal suggesting a new marketing strategy, your group will need to do extensive research and analysis on the company, the target market, the current marketing strategy, and marketing techniques. To accomplish all these tasks, the ISR unit will ask your group to break up the GPA project into smaller components; each group member will write his or her ISR on one of those smaller components. When it comes time to write the GPA, the group will have much of the necessary research and some of the analysis needed to write a successful proposal. The group, however, may not cut and paste sections, paragraphs, sentences, or illustrations from the ISRs into the GPA. The GPA is a new document that has its own audience, purpose, content, and organization.

Assignment Overview

The report is a common document that is written for a variety of reasons in a professional setting; for example, reports analyze data or update project plans. Oftentimes, as is the case with your ISR, reports focus on research and analysis. The purpose of each ISR will vary depending on the focus of each group and the needs of the proposed project, but each ISR will need to consider what information is relevant to its intended purpose and audience, how to best organize that information for reader accessibility or content cohesion, and what tone, style, and format is most appropriate.

Your audience for the ISR will primarily be your colleagues (group members) and your boss (instructor). Remember that reports frequently target multiple audiences, which requires careful consideration when dealing with tone and style. As a rule, it is better to set the formality of a report to the highest audience member; for example, while you might be more informal with colleagues, you would want to be more formal with superiors and clients. Because you may not have someone to read over drafts of your documents in a professional setting, you will be graded on GSP errors; please review your GSP Inventory to begin correcting GSP issues you are making.

The reports you will generate

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