13.7. THE STYLE OF REPORT The inquiry’s writing team will need clear guidelines on the style of the report. Style goes to communications: how the report is written affects its readability, its persuasiveness and its impact. Style is related to the issue of target groups. It must be a style acceptable to the various target groups. But the breadth of those groups makes that difficult. The writing team is challenged to produce a report that, for example, will withstand critical bureaucratic and academic examination and yet be able to be read and understood by a general readership. Some basic principles can guide the writing to ensure an appropriate style. • The report should be as short as possible, consistent with the need to include the necessary material. Even for an academic audience, shorter is always better than longer, and for a political audience a long report simply will not be read. • The report should be written as simply as possible, in clear, concise language. It should be accessible to as wide a readership as possible, while recognising that no single document will be appropriate and accessible for every reader. • Its language should be measured, never exaggerated, relying on fact rather than rhetoric – writing is most persuasive when it allows the facts to speak for themselves. • Wherever possible the report should quote directly from the evidence, especially the evidence of victims. The report’s legitimacy will rest on the quality of the evidence and the credibility of the witnesses and so it should let them speak in their own words. • The contents of the report should be properly referenced or footnoted to material provided to or collected by the inquiry. Good referencing enhances credibility but, to be able to reference well, the inquiry will need to have established good cataloguing, filing and retrieval systems for the information it obtains. • The report should clearly distinguish between the evidence and views of others and the findings and conclusions of the inquiry itself and between its analysis and its recommendations. In particular, recommendations should be clearly identified and numbered individually to make them easy to refer to and monitor. 13.8. SOME OTHER MATTERS There are many other matters relating to the report that will need to be discussed and decided. They are technical matters but not merely technical. They all go to the impact the report will have. The inquiry will want the report to be as influential as possible and will need to take care in deciding these matters. It should draw on the advice of professionals with expertise in communications. The title of the report is important as it is the first contact a reader will have with the report. It has the potential to influence the reader before a word of the report is read. The title should be simple. Sometimes it will only say what the report is, The Report of the National Inquiry into… . That kind of title has the benefit of being clear and simple and formal. It gives the report an official stamp. Where the inquiry wants to emphasise the official nature of the report, that will be enough. The title communicates in an official way what the report is about. However, the title can also communicate a stronger message about the subject matter of the inquiry itself. It can make a point. It can attempt to express in a few words a critical message of the inquiry itself. The National Inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island children from their families called its report Bringing Them Home. The phrase came from the words of many of the witnesses, especially victims: parents who said they wanted their children ‘to come home’, children who said they wanted ‘to go home’. It emphasised that this was an issue of family and home, not a complex social or economic problem that was too difficult to resolve. Chapter 13: Prepare the report | 67