 | The Foundation: Audience and Purpose
 | Communication vs. self-expression |
| How to identify:
- your department's most important customers
- what each customer needs from your audit reports
- how to exceed each customer's expectations |
| The eight critical attributes of a good audit report |
| Exercise: Identify and rank your department's most important
customers; analyze each customer's needs and expectations
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| The Thought Process: Developing Audit Findings
| How to develop effective findings and recommendations:
- the five attribute approach
- participatory reporting |
| Exercises:
- Develop findings using the five attribute approach
- Role-play participatory discussion to develop
recommendation with your customer
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| The Writing Process: Getting It Down On Paper
| How to make good writing easy:
- Use the "smart" writing process
- Follow a good pattern |
| The three steps in the "smart" writing process – and why
keeping them separate is key to success |
| An approach to outlining so simple and helpful you'll want to use
it |
| The paragraph model: use it and cut your writing time in half |
| Writing Lab:
- Plan and organize audit comments
- Write audit comments without editing
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| Trends and Innovations in Audit Reports
| Example 1: The balanced scorecard |
| Example 2: Management Action Plan format |
| Example 3: The one-page audit report
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| Self-Editing
| How to read what you wrote, not what you think you wrote |
| Getting the fog out - short sentences, simple words |
| Getting the life in - action verbs, concrete words |
| Persuading the reader - positive words, using the reader's jargon |
| The four step approach to powerful self-editing |
| Writing Lab:
- Self-edit to reduce fog factor
- Self edit to increase "motor to weight ratio"
- Self-edit to improve persuasiveness
- Writing/organizing/editing exercises, with immediate
feedback from your peers and the instructor
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| Review, Revision, and Other Hateful Things
| Why do we do this to each other? The typical review/revision process |
| There is a better way: how to cut revisions in half and reduce
issuance time from several weeks to one day
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| Format: Making It Look Professional
| Desktop publishing with your word processor |
| Tricks of the trade: using fonts, white space, borders, boxes, etc. |
| Exercise: Redesign your department's report
format
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