Report Writing, Grammar, and Spelling
Report Writing, Grammar, and Spelling tests whether you can produce a factual, readable account that a supervisor, a hearing body, or a court can rely on. Corrections reports are legal records: vague, emotional, or grammatically broken writing creates doubt and can be challenged.
Core rules
- Write in chronological order with times and locations.
- Use first person past tense for what you did and observed: 'I observed,' 'I instructed.'
- Keep active voice so the actor is clear: 'Officer Reyes secured the door,' not 'the door was secured.'
- Report observable behavior, not conclusions: 'He clenched his fists and spoke in a raised voice,' not 'He was belligerent.'
- Include who, what, when, where, how, and what you did next.
- Check subject-verb agreement, pronoun reference, tense consistency, and commonly confused words: their/there, affect/effect, passed/past, loose/lose.
Worked example
Draft: 'Me and Officer Smith was assigned to the unit. The inmate refused to return to his cell, he was escorted to holding.' Revision: 'Officer Smith and I were assigned to the unit. Inmate Doe refused to return to his cell. Officer Smith and I escorted him to holding at 1410 hours.' Reasoning: 'Me and Officer Smith' is the wrong case; the compound subject takes 'were'; the comma splice becomes two sentences; the passive 'was escorted' hides who acted.
Traps
Editorializing instead of describing; shifting tense; unexplained pronouns; missing times; misspelled names and ID numbers; quoting slang without clarification; stating a conclusion before the facts that support it.