Report recommendations

Recommendations are often included with a report’s conclusion, although they serve different purposes. Whereas a conclusion offers you the opportunity to summarize or review your report’s main ideas, recommendations suggest actions to be taken in response to the findings of a report. You can regard recommendations as a prompt to action for your readers. As you have seen from your planning, your report structure should lead up to the recommendations and provide justification for them. Just as a proposal grows from your project’s goals and objectives, a report should actually grow backwards from your recommendations. Having your recommendations accepted then becomes part of your purpose.

What makes a good recommendation? Effective recommendations:

• describe a suggested course of action to be taken to solve a particular problem;
• are written as action statements without justification;
• are stated in clear, specific language;
• should be expressed in order of importance;
• are based on the case built up in the body of the report; are written in parallel structure.

A word of caution about writing recommendations: you should always consider your relationship with the reader first. If you have no authority to make recommendations, the reader may be hostile to their presence.

Have a look at the following examples from different types of reports. Many of the recommendations included here are well written but a few contain some significant shortcomings. Position your cursor over the excerpts to see our comments.

© WHO 2011