Below is an outline of the major elements to include in your 900-1300 word preliminary report.  The report should have four main sections:

• an Overview of your project
• a Research Methods section
• a Preliminary Results section
• a Discussion section

section one:  overview of your project

• First, describe your site. Set the scene for the reader about the kind of workplace you have been researching.  What is the nature of the business or organization?  Describe it in the kind of detail that helps your reader form a vivid picture of the particular kind of workplace you have been investigating. If possible, try to highlight details that seem to have some specific relevance to your areas of research.
• Second, describe your primary research subject or contact. Introduce your reader to the writer whose work is at the center of your research project. What does this person do for the particular organization or business?  What kind of writing does he or she do? What is his or her education and background? How old is he or she? Describe your writer in the kind of detail that helps your reader form a vivid picture of him or her as a person and as a writer, and again, try to focus on facts or characteristics that have particular relevance to your areas of research.
• Third, describe the other key people your writer works with.  Who are they (if there is more than one) and what is their relationship to your contact?  What do they do for the particular organization or business?  What kind of writing do they do? What is their education (if you know)? Describe them also in the kind of detail that helps your reader form a vivid picture of them as people, and perhaps as writers.
• Fourth, describe the kinds of writing and the writing process you have been investigating. After these descriptions, explain to your reader what specific questions are guiding your research.  You may want to sub-divide this part of your preliminary report into separate sections, each focusing on a particular question. These questions can come from the three writers we have discussed so far (hooks, Kleimann, and MacIntosh) and the handout on business vs. literary writing styles, as well ideas that have come up for you in other ways. In other words, describe as well as you can the specific ways you have been investigating our major themes.
• Fifth, make your own biases explicit for your reader.  Example: Do you work at the site you are investigating and already have an idea of the kind of improvements or changes that need to be made?  Do you have other biases and if so, what are they?  How might such biases influence your research?  Explain your unique perspective (your biases) to your readers, and how that perspective might influence your work, before you begin to write about what you observed and discovered about how writing gets done in this workplace.

• Collecting workplace writing samples:  Describe the kinds of workplace writing that you found and the documents that you have been collecting; then explain how you could focus on them in light of the questions, concepts, and ideas you have formulated so far for guiding your research. Also, are these documents written in a business or a literary style, as spelled out by Tom McKeown? Are they a mix of both styles? Why are they written in a particular style?
• Interviews:  Discuss the methods you used during any interviews, and any results so far from interviews.  How did you prepare for interviews?  What types of questions did you ask? Did any types seem to work better?  As well as you can, summarize how your discoveries from interviews relate to the specific questions, concepts, and ideas that have guided your research up to this point.
• Observations:  Describe what you have observed of the ways people work together in your workplace in terms of any two of our major themes thus far (socioeconomic class, individual/hierarchical/collaborative writing, race/class/gender/sexuality relations, and business/literary style). Describe how what you have observed relates to the general questions that have guided your research.
• Other: Describe any other research methods that you have used so far, including the use of library or online sources. Remember that in the final draft of your final report, you must cite at least three clearly useful sources that you have discovered on your own (you may include one interview among these three, though of course, you can include in your final report reference to more than one interview; two other outside sources must be such items as articles, web sites, and so on).

In this section, explain what you have discovered so far by collecting workplace writing samples,interviews, and observations.  Make sure to relate what you have found to some of the themes that we have been reading about and discussing in class; you can also relate it to any outside research sources.

section four:  discussion

This is the place to wrap up your preliminary report by discussing:

• questions that arose that you haven't been able answer yet
• new questions that your research raised (that you don't necessarily have to answer) and/or new problems you discovered
• and any preliminary recommendations you may have about the way writing gets done in your particular workplace

Finally, briefly explain the kinds of research you feel you will need to do in order to complete your final report.