Executive summaries

Written information can take the form of an executive summary: a short overview placed at the start of a report. It sums up the whole document for a reader who may not read the rest, so it must make sense on its own.

It is written for decision-makers, such as managers, who need the key points quickly. A busy reader should be able to understand the issue and decide what to do next without reading every page. It normally covers four things: the purpose of the report, the main findings, the conclusions and any recommendations.

For example, a report into why a school's online homework system keeps crashing might have an executive summary saying: the purpose was to investigate the crashes; the main finding was that most crashes happened when many classes logged on at 4pm; the conclusion was that the server cannot cope at peak times; and the recommendation was to move homework deadlines away from that time. That gives a manager the whole story in a few lines.

An executive summary is usually no longer than a page. It is written last, once the report is complete, because it can only summarise findings and conclusions that already exist.

Executive summary or introduction?

These two are easy to mix up. An introduction says what the report will cover. An executive summary gives the findings and conclusions themselves.