Genre Focus: Recommendation Reports

What a Recommendation Report Is

A recommendation report investigates a problem or a set of options and argues for a specific course of action.

Its job is twofold: inform the reader about a situation, and persuade them that a particular response to it is the right one. Because it asks the reader to act, it has to do more than present findings — it has to build a case a decision-maker can stand on.

You will also see this same kind of document called a feasibility report, an evaluation report, or something else entirely, depending on the source or the organization. There is no single, agreed-on set of labels for these documents across industries or textbooks. The Common Types section below sorts out where recommendation reports sit among the others.

Why Recommendation Reports Matter and What They Do

Recommendation reports exist because someone has to decide, and they need the evidence in front of them to decide well.

The reader is rarely going to read start to finish. They are busy, and they will scan for the section they need — often jumping straight to the recommendation before circling back to the analysis that supports it. That means the report has to work for a reader who reads out of order: the recommendation has to make sense on its own, and the analysis has to hold up when they come back to check it.

Before drafting, you have to make a set of calls about the specific reader in front of you:

How much background knowledge can this reader be expected to have?
Would a table, chart, or graph communicate something faster than a paragraph would?
What order will this reader expect the sections to come in?
Does this reader need plain language, or can the report use technical terms freely?

Answering these determines the report’s content and structure before a word of the body gets written.

Common Types

“Technical report” is an umbrella term, not one fixed format — and the names underneath it are not used consistently from source to source.

The same kind of document gets called a recommendation report by one instructor and a feasibility report by another, and neither is wrong. Organizations settle on whatever terminology makes sense for the work they do. What matters more than the label is which of these jobs your document is actually doing.

Type	What Prompts It	What It Does	Example
Recommendation Report	A decision between two or more options	Compares the options against shared criteria and argues for one	Choosing between three vendors for a new tool
Feasibility Report	One proposed action whose viability is in question	Assesses whether that single option is workable — not a comparison	Whether a company should relocate to a specific building
Evaluation Report	A need to judge the merit of something already in place	Measures a subject against criteria and reports how well it performs	Assessing whether a completed training program met its goals
Trip or Field Report	Travel or on-site work done for the organization	Documents what was observed or done away from the office	A report from a site inspection or a conference

This course’s assignment is a recommendation report: a defined question, a set of options or evidence, and a specific recommendation at the end.

Standard Format: The Segments

A recommendation report moves the reader from problem to evidence to answer, in that order.

The format below follows Writing Commons’ treatment of the genre, and it is the standard for this course. Expect any organization you write for to have its own house version, and follow theirs when you get there.

Section	What It Does
Introduction	States the problem or question prompting the report, the report’s purpose, and what is ahead. Establishes who the report is for and what it covers.
Methods	Describes how the information was gathered — sources consulted, people interviewed, data collected — and why those methods fit the question.
Results	Presents what the research turned up, organized by task or question, without yet interpreting what it means.
Scope / Limitations	States what the report does not cover, and any constraints on the research — time, access, sample size — that affect how much weight the findings should carry.
Conclusions	Draws the major takeaways from the results — what the findings mean, kept separate from how they were found.
Recommendations	States what the reader should do, tied directly to the conclusions above. No new evidence appears here.

Layout Conventions

A recommendation report is built to be scanned, not read straight through.

Use headings that name their actual content, so a reader jumping to one section can find it without reading the others.
Use tables, charts, or graphs wherever they would communicate a comparison faster than prose would — this is a genre built around comparing options, so visuals carry real weight here.
Organize the body in the order your specific reader will expect to encounter it, which will not always match the order you researched it in.
Specific formatting requirements — length, spacing, heading style — are set in the assignment prompt, not here.

Before You Draft

A short check before you start drafting catches most of the problems that sink a recommendation report.

Have you identified exactly what decision this report needs to support?
Do you know how much your reader already knows about the problem?
Have you decided where a table or chart would work better than a paragraph?
Does your recommendation make sense to a reader who reads only that section?
Have you separated what you found (Results) from what it means (Conclusions)?

Sources & Further Reading

Everything referenced above, if you want to go to the originals.

Writing Commons, “Recommendation Reports” — source of the genre definition and the section-by-section format used above.
“Writing a Technical Report” (video, Academic Skills, University of Melbourne) — assigned viewing, embedded at the top of this page. Source of the reader-behavior and audience-analysis material in Why They Matter and Layout Conventions.
“Recommendation Reports: Terminology and Approach” (video) — source of the terminology discussion in What a Recommendation Report Is and Common Types.
David McMurrey, “Recommendation and Feasibility Reports,” Online Technical Writing — source of the distinctions among report types in the Common Types table. Includes sample reports worth reviewing before you draft.
Suzan Last, “Recommendation Reports and Feasibility Studies,” Technical Writing Essentials — a fuller treatment of the genre than this page covers, useful if you want a second perspective on how the body can be organized.