Accountants deal with numbers so they don't need to worry about writing, right? Wrong! Accountants make their living from creating and communicating information on which powerful decisions are made.
We are information merchants and in the digital age with increasing automation and software to handle the numbers, our ability to communicate through our words is becoming even more important in the workplace.
So journalists produce news articles, fiction writers produce novels, accountants? Our main form of written communication is a Business Report. So how can you go about producing high-quality written communication in your business report? Some of the basic stuff you probably already know.
Make sure you use headings and subheadings, write an executive summary and use software such as grammarly to check your spelling and grammar. Another strategy is to focus on refining and using something that we call your 'rhetorical moves', which is another way of saying writing strategies or signals that make your text persuasive and clear.
For example, a rhetorical move might be to use evidence to support an argument, to open up a topic or to wind down to a conclusion. When it comes to writing business reports there are a few rhetorical moves that are particularly important.
First are summary statements and these clearly signal to your reader what you intend or what is intent or goal of your report. These summary statements should be at the beginning of your report and if necessary at the beginning of your paragraphs like topic sentences. They are important so that a reader has a sense of what you'll be covering in the text to follow.
Second, business reports inform readers by providing background information and previous work so it's important you're writing signals where the information has come from. You can do this by using appropriate referencing as well as mentioning in text if the statement you're referring to is according to the organization, media commentators, industry reports or elsewhere.
Third, business reports often provide a particular perspective or stance. This is because it's not sufficient just to rehash what has been said elsewhere. A good report will also help reader make sense of it.
So you might take a stance on what is the most important issue, what has been overlooked, what is the key problem or what the solution might be. What you take a stance on will depend on the aim of the report and this is where it's good to read your assignment instructions.
The key thing is for your writing to make clear the central argument or point the report is trying to convince the reader about.
Once you've mastered these basics of business reports: summary statements, background information and perspective and stance, then you can start working on more sophisticated rhetorical moves that are really going to make your report stand out.
For example, you could start to practice ways to use emphasis to draw your readers attention to your reports key ideas, you could highlight novel improvements to existing ideas, or you could use contrast or mobilize alternative viewpoints to show the complexity or tension or critical insight about a particular issue.
You can get feedback on your use of these rhetorical moves from a program developed here at UTS called AcaWriter. You input your text into the program and it will analyze your writing and identify where you've actually used certain moves.
You can then modify your text and put it in the program and run the feedback again. The program won't pick up everything so you'll still have to use your own judgment. It's just like when you choose to ignore grammarly suggestion about American English because we know here at UTS that we use Australian English.
When you're reviewing your feedback from from AcaWriter think about what is and is not highlighted by you in your writing and if there's no highlighting then you need to go hmm have I actually used that rhetorical move to clearly signal what I'm trying to communicate, and if you have used certain rhetorical moves have you been explicit enough, because if AcaWriter doesn't pick it up maybe you'll reader won't pick it up either.
Using AcaWriter can help you ask the right questions when you're reviewing your writing so that you can develop your written communication skills, produce high-quality business reports, and ultimately have the power to influence decisions based on your accounting information, and to clearly signal early yep I'm gonna have to just do this bit.
This Writing Activity with Writing Analytics (WAWA) was developed as part of the doctoral research conducted by Shibani Antonette, as part of the Academic Writing Analytics project at the University of Technology Sydney’s Connected Intelligence Centre.
The current WAWA includes design patterns which were transferred to business report writing context for Accounting students from the law essay writing context. The feedback messages and writing tasks were tuned for this context according to assessment criteria to provide meaningful learning activities for students. In this way, the writing analytics technology from AcaWriter was integrated into the classroom in authentic contexts with the help of academics. The educators played a major role in co-designing the context of the tasks and developing materials for students.
Learning Design
License: Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 
Developed by:
- Shibani Antonette, Simon Knight, Simon Buckingham Shum (Connected Intelligence Centre, University of Technology Sydney)
- Nicole Sutton, Raechel Wight (Business School, University of Technology Sydney)
Learning design for the accounting context included a set of online and classroom writing tasks designed for students by embedding the use of AcaWriter over several weeks as below:
The homework task is facilitated by an online platform called AcaWriter-Tutor which provides an induction for students to use AcaWriter feedback for their business report writing. The tasks in Weeks 1 and 2 used exemplar texts to motivate students to try AcaWriter with sample texts given to them. In the following weeks, they used their own writing and used AcaWriter for their assignment submission. The introduction video by the instructor which introduces students to rhetorical moves in the context of their writing and the use of AcaWriter is below:
TBC
Analytics Genre Profile
This describes the Genre module in AcaWriter that has been developed to support this activity.
License: Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0
Developed by: Shibani Antonette (University of Technology Sydney)
Version: 1.0
Based on: Analytical Writing (Standard)
Purpose: Highlights sentences that appear to show hallmarks of good academic writing for a UTS business report and to provide specific feedback on possible improvements that can be made in that context.
Textual Features: The analytical report highlights rhetorical moves from the following list that AcaWriter identified in the text:
S: Summarises or signals the author’s goals
P: Perspective or stance
E: Emphasis of a significant or important idea
N: Novel improvements in ideas
C: Contrasting idea, tension or critical insight
B: Background information and previous work
These moves are tagged at the sentence level. There can be more than one rhetorical move in a sentence.
Feedback: Feedback consists of three tabs: Analytical Report, Feedback and Examples (see screenshot).
The Analytical Report tab shows highlighted moves for reflection:
The Feedback tab provides more specific feedback on missing rhetorical moves in a business report context. This tab first displays a cautionary message shown for all texts, followed by feedback on specific missing moves in the report, mapping them to the assessment criteria. The feedback also includes suggestions on possible improvements that can be made, e.g.
This is dynamically updated by checking for the moves whenever the student uses the Get Feedback button. Students may receive zero or more additional feedback messages depending on the rhetorical moves AcaWriter identified in their text.
The Tips tab provides examples of sentences from a business report by mapping it to rhetorical moves identified by AcaWriter. This tab remains static to help students relate the rhetorical moves to their report’s assessment criterion to better make use of the feedback from AcaWriter.
Research
Here’s what we’re learning, and more details on the rationale underpinning the design and implementation of (i) the analytics tools, and (ii) the student activities:
Antonette Shibani, Simon Knight and Simon Buckingham Shum (Forthcoming). Contextualizable Learning Analytics Design: A Generic Model, and Writing Analytics Evaluations. Full paper accepted for publication at the Ninth International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge(LAK ’19), Tempe, Arizona
Simon Knight, Antonette Shibani and Simon Buckingham Shum (2018). Augmenting Formative Writing Assessment with Learning Analytics: A Design Abstraction Approach. Full Paper presented at the London Festival of Learning cross-over track at ICLS’18.
Antonette Shibani, Simon Knight, Simon Buckingham Shum and Philippa Ryan (2017). Design and Implementation of a Pedagogic Intervention Using Writing Analytics. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Computers in Education. New Zealand: Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education.
Antonette Shibani (2018). AWA-Tutor: A Platform to Ground Automated Writing Feedback in Robust Learning Design (Demo). In Companion Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge (LAK ’18), Sydney, Australia.
Knight, S., Buckingham Shum, S., Ryan, P., Sándor, Á., & Wang, X. (2017). Academic Writing Analytics for Civil Law: Participatory Design Through Academic and Student Engagement. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 28, (1), 1-28.