For this assignment you will produce a proposal, dressed up in a formal report pattern ( see below) and responding to the following scenario:
At Atrium of Canada, the company has been doing very well in the past eight months, and the senior management group, in consultation with the Budget and Finance Department, has identified a sum of $250,000 as available to deal with needs of the various departmental areas. Each department, yours included, has been asked to make one or more proposals which
a) identify a problem
b) show what sorts of solutions might be considered
c)recommend a particular solution
d) support the recommendation with arguments related to appropriate criteria
e) provide a budget, a schedule, and an implementation plan, and
f) explain why this proposal might benefit departments other than itself.
Senior management has put a limit of $25,000 on any single proposal’s budget, but a department might choose to submit several proposals whose total costs add up to more than this figure.
The report body will be 5-7 pages long ( single spaced,1250-1750 words) and penalties will be assigned if the length strays outside this range. The body of the report will, however, have material in front of it and matter after it.
In Chapter 11 of our text, there is a discussion of the organization of a formal report, including a checklist of usual components of the opening section/ executive summary of a report and of the remainder of the body, and finally, a review of some possible organizing principles which you might consider using to arrange your material. The chapter also discusses elements of a formal report which appear before and after the body of the report itself and which we shall call Front Matter and End Matter.
Front matter will be comprised of a title page, a memo of transmittal and a Table of Contents. The title page (see sample, p. 385 (339) arranges the same information as the front part of a memorandum, i.e. to, from, date and subject, usually in the following order:
Title
Presented to:
Presented by:
Date
The memo of transmittal is written to the same person as named in the Presented to field of the title page (in our case, to Dr. Susan Cody, President, Atrium of Canada) in memo format (see p. 320/348), and its standard plan, purpose and contents are discussed on p. 378 (331), with an example on p. 386 (340).
The Table of Contents, in this case, will list major headings in the report, providing a convenient overview of the placement of material for easy reference; a sample Table of Contents is on p. 387 (341).
End Matter includes such things as Appendices, Lists including perhaps a glossary and a formal section citing sources of your information (References or Bibliography). Of these, the only required end matter is a bibliography. In the text, pp. 334-06 (381-2) outline the information needed for a formal Bibliographical entry, and then some model entries for various types of sources, both in the format you will use for the Bibliography and also in the format you will use in the body of the report under a visual or below a list or within a paragraph. For our report, please use the American Psychological Association (APA) format. To search for fuller handbook sources on the Web, type “APA bibliography” into your search engine; several useful sources result.
Our text has its usual checklists; you may find the following most helpful:
Checklist for Writing Proposals, p. 367 (320)
