Say it plainly: Writing a report for your community partners

Question: I’m completing a multi-year participatory research project with a coalition of tenant advocates and precariously housed residents — some with professional backgrounds in law, policy, and community organizing; others bringing expertise rooted in lived experience. They’ve shaped my research questions, challenged my assumptions and pushed back on my interpretations throughout the project. Now I owe them a final report, but I’m not sure how to write for them. Unlike our previous communications, a report feels fixed and permanent. These are sophisticated readers, but they aren’t academics, and I’m worried that a report that would satisfy my scholarly peers will fail the people who made the research possible. How do I communicate findings effectively to readers like these?

— Anonymous, Urban Planning 

Dr. Editor’s response:

I’ll start with an assumption, dear letter-writer: that you already know what your partners, participants and co-researchers want this report to focus on, and that the content of your report will centre community-identified priorities. I’ll assume as well that you’ve considered sharing a draft of your report with your partners, to ensure they’re happy with how their perspectives are represented. Taking those two assumptions as given, let’s focus on how to share what you’ve learned in a way that works for the people you’ve worked with.   

Because this is such a big topic, I’m answering this question in two parts. Next month, I’ll share what I learned from a research visualization expert, who’ll advise you on how to pair your words with images; for this month’s answer, I spoke with Jenn Rossiter (jennrossiter.com), an editor who often works at the intersection of non-profit and academic spheres. Here’s what Ms. Rossiter advised:  

1. Front-load your structure 

Your report’s readers are diverse, and so of course they’re going to have diverse reasons for opening this document. Some will want the full picture; others will want to know, as quickly as possible, what you found and what you’re recommending. Both are legitimate ways to read a report, and your structure should serve both. 

Ms. Rossiter advises using the ‘inverted pyramid’ structure that is classic to newspaper reports: write your paragraphs so the main point comes first, with the supporting detail following. “Last night, city council approved a new bike lane on Main Street,” for example. This runs against the grain of academic writing: “Traffic modelling was conducted along three candidate corridors, and public consultations (N=200) were held between June and …” — well, you get the idea. Academics are used to building up to a conclusion, showing us the evidence and the process before the results. In a report like yours, put the conclusion up front and let the evidence support it afterward.  

The same principle should govern the report as a whole: after a short opening summary, your findings and recommendations should be given the most prominent real estate, followed by technical details held in reserve for the readers who want it. Consider, for example, the literature review and methods section. Your participants and co-researchers lived the process you’re describing, and many of them probably helped to design it; they’re not interested in replicating it, and don’t need you to outline or justify your approach the way you would to a peer. Move that material to an appendix, where it’s available to anyone who wants it, and let your findings and recommendations lead the document instead. 

2. Adopt a straightforward writing style 

A number of academic writing habits that are normal and expected in peer-reviewed texts won’t serve your report’s readers. For example, academics are accustomed to writing in abstraction: because they write about ideas, concepts and theories, scholars have a tendency to let abstract words “take over and multiply, even in sentences that describe the actions and attributes of concrete entities such as people, places, and things,” Helen Sword notes in her book Stylish Academic Writing. This tendency to think about concepts, abstracted from the tangible things in concrete places, can manifest in what editors call “nominalizations”: verbs abstracted into nouns.  

Ms. Rossiter singles out nominalizations as one of the most common problems she edits: “nominalizations like ‘the evaluation of’ or ‘the facilitation of’ add length and a formal voice that can feel misplaced in a report like this.” So, instead of “the implementation of a new intake process was undertaken,” go with “we implemented a new intake process,” or, simply, “we changed our intake process.” The free writing analysis tool that I developed, writingwellishard.com, will identify the nominalizations in your draft text; see also my 2022 column “Zombie-proof your writing: tips for making the conceptual concrete.” 

Similarly, mind your acronyms. You may have grown used to using initials for the organizations and programs involved in your project, or even for the groups of people in your work: I’ve read community-engaged participatory studies about “PWD” (“people who use wheeled devices”) and “PLHIV” (“people living with HIV”), but I wouldn’t recommend using these terms in a report written for these people, and not just because these readers won’t have internalized this shorthand. Acknowledging that acronyms are sometimes unavoidable, Ms. Rossiter recommends: “If you have 10+ acronyms, include a reference table for your readers.”  

Finally, Ms. Rossiter advises what editors of academic writing always advise: favour the active voice. I get into the nitty-gritty of active and passive voice in my 2020 article “Using the active voice strategically.” 

3. Write honestly about the pushback 

It’s worthwhile to be honest about the assumptions your partners challenged and the interpretations they pushed back on; you don’t need to smooth over these points in favour of producing a tidy, conclusive-sounding report. “Disagreements and tension, though they may feel like failure, can be valuable data,” Ms. Rossiter told me. 

If your partners disagreed with an early interpretation, or if the project elicited real tension about power, trust or whose priorities should come first, that tension is part of what you learned. Write about it directly, reflecting on the process. This isn’t about apologizing; you aren’t confessing a flaw in your methodology or a failure of your analysis. You’re describing what you and your partners learned by disagreeing, which is often more useful to future readers than a report that resolves too neatly. 

Ms. Rossiter is careful to note that being honest about disagreement only works inside a real relationship. “Relationship-building is a long-term commitment,” she told me; “trust is paramount to good data and accurate interpretation.” Writing openly about tension with your partners depends on that trust already being in place. 

In sum, dear letter-writer, the writing you’ll do in this report might not feel natural, because it requires structures and techniques that likely aren’t the norm in the kinds of documents you usually read and write. This kind of writing requires skill, and while you build that skill, it requires multiple drafts. We all know that community-led research takes a lot of time to do well — this is only one part of the reason why. 

Next month, we’ll consider what your report might look like once you’ve got words right. 

For more writing advice, see our full Ask Dr. Editor archive.