Rules For Writing An Executive Summery

In any report, title page or cover page is followed by a short summary of the whole report. This short summary is technically called the Executive Summary. It is also known as Abstract. The executive summary provides the gist of the whole report. It explains all the important aspects of the report in short. The executive summary is the gateway to the document and desires to be interesting to encourage the reader to continue reading it.

The executive summary is generally written for “Managerial Readers”, the type of readers which have hectic routine and do not have much time to read the whole report, so they are interested only in the gist of report and from which they can interpret the whole report and can draw its conclusion.

Nature

Executive summary should be qualitative in nature which means that use of numerical data is avoided, and abbreviations are also avoided so that reader may not get confused about any point and clearly understand the summary of the whole report.

Structure

An executive summary should be written keeping in view the following points:

• It should have about 150-250 words.
• It should be written in language easily understood by target audience.
• It should have short and concise paragraphs.
• It should include all the main points in the report.
• It should use informal language.
• It should use factual information.
• It should have examples that are familiar to readers.
• It should not have any spelling and grammatical mistakes.

Points to consider while writing Executive Summary:

• It is suggested to write the executive summary at the end of report because after writing the whole report you can sum up all the points very easily in executive summary.
• It should be written in a manner to grabs reader’s attention.
• You should clearly define the purpose of writing report that which problem leads to write this report.
• You should be clear about your aims and objectives.
• You should describe the procedure that you have applied to solve your problem.
• You should then mention the results/findings of your subject matter.
• You should provide some conclusions which you have deduced from your study.
• At the end, recommendations should be provided for research workers who want to work further in that field in future.

Steps before writing an executive summary:

Before writing executive summary of any report or research it is critically important to read the whole report or paper thoroughly from start to end. It is also useful to make notes along reading and highlighting the important points which will help you to organize and summarize your executive summary section.

Isolate the Major Points

It is also important to choose the main points and highlight them in this section so that readers will be interested to read them that what this document is trying to say.

Separate the Main Sections

Executive summary of report has many sections which will be discussed next. It is important to separate those sections and provide the main idea of each section in executive summary which is an important part of executive summary section.

Sections of Executive Summary

There are some important sections which are to be written in executive summary section while writing that section for any report related to business or any other document, without these sections the executive summary would fail to do its job.

Project Focus

This is the first part of any executive summary and it describes the problems that are encountered and becomes the reason for writing the report. This is very important section of executive summary as it is the first section and engage readers to read the remaining portion, so it must be interesting and encouraging. In this section, subject matter should be clearly mentioned to make readers well aware of reason for writing report.

Project Goals

This is the second section of project executive summary which generally focus on listing the goals of the project which you have to achieve in your project. Setting goals or in other words defining aims/objectives is very necessary in any report because reader will come to know about what was the objectives which were set to solve the specific problem mention in first section. Goals should be defined keeping in view some of important points which are:

Environment (Business/ organizational/ academia). The person by whom you have been assigned the task of composing the report.

Project Design and Methodology

The third section of executive summary is design/methodology. In this section the author has to mention the method which he has applied to solve that problem with reference to the aims/objectives mentioned in previous section. If this section is written in executive summary for a business report then the author has to mention the method/technique through which the data has collected.

Key Findings/Results of the project

The next important section in executive summary of any report is the findings. After defining the method applied to solve a problem some outcomes are obtained on the basis of that method which have to be informed to readers. If the report is about some experiment, then in findings section of executive summary of that report author must mention the results obtained after performing that experiment.

Conclusion

Conclusions are logical deductions based on the data in the finding section. This section sums up the main things which the author concludes while performing the whole experiment/research.

Recommendations

Recommendations are provided for researchers who want to work in the same area as the author. Recommendations are provided based on the findings and conclusion to allow the researchers to think about those ideas which were making issues while the author’s research.

Limitations

Limitations may also be included in executive summary at the end. This section is important for those people who want to work further in that area in future.

These all sections should be included in executive summary in short way to provide the gist of the whole report keeping in mind that it may not exceed the specified limit which is about 150-250 words or about 10% length of the whole report.