Xabrina Ovalle - Writing Informal Reports

Informal reports provide information to specific audiences so they can understand, explore, analyze, or act in some particular manner. They consider audience needs and backgrounds as well as involving extensive research. They can explain, inform, persuade, and/or recommend. Informal reports solve problems.

Informal reports can be written for many different purposes, such as these:

• To inform
• To explain
• To analyze
• To persuade
• To recommend

In the above Youtube, she is explaining a formal business proposal, but informal reports can take on the layout and design characteristics of formal reports. Informal reports can also be composed in different genre types, such as these:

• Memos
• Letters
• E-mails
• Presentations

Her report is explaining how negative information may seem informal, but she works it in a way that it can seem somewhat positive. Her example is a report that is for an internal audience (i.e a supervisor speaking to a co-worker.) Since informal reports include describing a problem to a client, explaining a new policy to employees, as well as announcing the status of a project to a manager, I feel as if this accurately portrays an informal report.

Reference:
Dorbin, Sidney I., Christopher J. Keller and Christian R. Weisser. Technical Communication: In the Twenty-First Century. Upper Sadle, NJ. Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008.