Audience & goals

• Write for your audience
  Writing a report often involves explaining things. Make sure your explanations are tailored to your audience. Are you writing for supervisors, anyone proficient in this particular subdomain, or anyone with a university degree in this field?
• Write towards your goal
  Make clear to yourself what the goals of the report are, and then make sure you write towards these goals.

Consider, for example, the final project of the CS study programme at the Open University. The final project is split into two courses: VAF and AF. The VAF phase is the preparatory phase. The goal of this phase (and thus, the accompanying report) is to come up with a report that satisfies the following three goals:

1. Clarify what the thesis project is about,
2. Clarify what methodology will be followed, and why that methodology was chosen,
3. Show that the obvious impediments to the research / methodology are surmountable.

The intended audience is (I) supervisors, (II) CS professionals. So the report should also be readable by CS professionals.