Report writing is not the easiest of jobs and one of the biggest mistakes made by many report writers is to neglect the final stage of their task - which is to edit and proof-read their report carefully.

It is almost inevitable that your report writing will contain textual errors. It is far better for you to find and correct those errors than for your readers to spot them and possibly become irritated by them. So often this final task of editing is done casually, if at all, whereas it should be done carefully and systematically.

So, how do you actually do it? Different writers will have different approaches, but most professional writers are likely to use the following seven techniques.

1. Print it! Read it! Fix it! Many people find it easier to edit a printed document than one still on the screen, so print and read it. If you stumble then your readers will almost certainly do so too. If you, the writer, cannot read your report without hesitating, then what chance have your readers got? Fix the obvious problems.

2. Shorten it! Draft reports are always too long. Remove anything that does not add value to your report. In fact, nothing like that should be in there but there will be something, maybe several things, so find them and delete them. Just because you sweated blood to discover a certain piece of information does not mean your reader needs to know it. If they do, include it; if they don't, leave it out. Be ruthless about this.

3. Keep your paragraphs and sentences fairly short. Try to achieve average paragraph lengths of around 5 or 6 lines if printed on A4 paper and aim for an average sentence length of just under 20 words. Short paragraphs and sentences look more inviting and are easier to read than long ones. Obviously some will be longer and some shorter than these guidelines.

4. Try to use plain English when writing reports