Most reports bury the one line that matters

I built a report last week that someone actually had to make a decision from. First draft, the one sentence that mattered sat on page three, under the methodology. Classic.

So I moved it. Verdict first, evidence below. People share the conclusion, not the appendix — if the answer isn’t on the first screen, the report doesn’t get read, it gets forwarded to someone who also won’t read it.

Two habits earn the right to put a claim up top. Cite every number to its source — a figure you can’t trace back is a rumour with formatting. And mark what’s exact versus estimated: write ~68%, not 68.3%, when you eyeballed it. False precision burns trust faster than an honest approximation ever will.

The catch: a report that’s all summary and no traceable evidence is just an opinion in a nice font. The TL;DR only works because the proof is one scroll away.