The District Report Deadline
A municipal administrator in Huambo must submit a 4,000-word report to the provincial government. She has three inputs: a 1,200-word draft from a field officer written in informal register with several spelling errors; a 2,500-word statistical annex from the planning office that is accurate but dense and full of tables; and her own 600-word summary of a community meeting. The deadline is in 48 hours. She has 6 working hours available across two days, and a junior assistant who can proofread but cannot restructure arguments. The provincial office requires a formal register, a clear executive summary of no more than 300 words, and all figures cited to their source. The administrator worries that merging the three inputs will produce repetition and inconsistent terminology (e.g., 'bairro' vs 'zona').
1. How should the administrator sequence the work across the 6 hours to meet the formal requirements without losing factual accuracy?
Read the worked answer
Sequencing principle: structure before prose, facts before polish.
- Hour 1 – Build the skeleton. Extract the report's required sections from the provincial template. Map each input to a section: field officer → context and qualitative findings; annex → all figures; her summary → priorities and recommendations. This prevents repetition because each input owns a section.
- Hour 2 – Terminological decision. Fix one term ('bairro') in a short glossary and apply it throughout. Inconsistent terminology is a coherence defect, not a style preference.
- Hours 3–4 – Draft the body. Write around the annex's figures, citing each to its source. Do not paraphrase numbers; transcribe them.
- Hour 5 – Executive summary. Write it last, in ≤300 words, drawing only on the finished body. Writing it first risks summarising intentions rather than results.
- Hour 6 – Assistant proofreads spelling and register while the administrator verifies every citation against the annex.
Judgement point: the assistant cannot restructure, so argumentative work must be finished before handover. Proofreading is the only task safely delegated under time pressure.
2. The field officer's draft contains a vivid but unverified claim that 'the market has doubled in size'. The annex has no figure for market size. What should the administrator do?
Read the worked answer
Do not publish an unverified quantitative claim in a formal report.
- The claim is quantitative ('doubled'), so it needs a source. The annex does not support it and the field officer's draft is not a citable source.
- Options, in order of preference:
- Verify with the field officer or planning office within the available hours. If confirmed with a source, include it with citation.
- Soften to a qualitative statement that is defensible: 'field officers report noticeable growth in market activity'. This preserves the observation without asserting a figure.
- Flag it in a footnote as requiring verification in the next reporting cycle.
- Never invent a figure or attribute the claim to the annex. A single fabricated statistic undermines the credibility of the whole report and breaches the citation requirement.
The exam tests the instinct to downgrade an unverified claim rather than delete or inflate it.