Below is an outline of the major elements to include in your 900-1500 word preliminary report.  The report should have four main sections, and these sections should be labeled:

• an Overview of your project
• a Research Methods section
• a Preliminary Results section
• a Discussion section

section one:  overview of your project

• First, describe your site. Set the scene for the reader about the kind of workplace you have been researching.  What is the nature of the business or organization?  Describe it in the kind of detail that helps your reader form a vivid picture of the particular kind of workplace you have been investigating. When possible, try to highlight as well details that seem to have some specific relevance to your areas of research.
• Second, describe your primary research subject or contact. Introduce your reader to the writer whose work is at the center of your research project. What does this person do for the particular organization or business?  What kind of writing does he or she do? What is his or her education and background? How old is this person? Describe your writer in the kind of detail that helps your reader form a vivid picture of him or her as a person, as a worker, and as a writer, and again, try to focus as well on facts or characteristics that have particular relevance to your areas of research.
• Third, describe the other key people your writer works with. Who are they (if there is more than one) and what is their relationship to your contact?  What do they do for the particular organization or business?  What kind of writing do they do? What is their education (if you know)? Describe them also in the kind of detail that helps your reader form a vivid picture of them as people, and perhaps as writers.
• Fourth, describe the kinds of writing that your writer does. "writing in the wild" includes ALL forms of writing (even e-mail and sticky-paper notes). How much of this person's work consists of writing? How important is writing to his or her job?
• Fifth, make your own biases explicit for your reader.  Good researchers realize that no one can be purely objective; every researcher has a particular, unique perspective that will influence how they see and interpret their understandings of that which they investigate. For instance, this position might prevent them from asking or even perceiving certain questions, and it will probably influence how they interpret their results. Therefore, good researchers consider, and then spell out, their potential biases, warning their readers as best they can of how the research and its results might be influenced by biases held by the researcher.  Here are some questions of this sort that you might answer in this section of your preliminary report: Do you work at the site you are investigating? Do you already know this "writer in the wild," or the profession this person works in? Do you have other biases and if so, what are they?  How might such biases influence your research?  Generally, do what you can here to explain to your readers some of the possible biases brought about by your unique perspective, and how that perspective might have influenced your research so far, and also, perhaps, how it could influence the rest of your research.

• Collecting workplace writing samples:  Describe the kinds of workplace writing that you have found and the documents that you have been collecting; then explain how you could focus on them in light of the questions, concepts, and ideas you have formulated so far for guiding your research. Also, are these documents written in a professional or a literary style, as spelled out by Tom McKeown? Are they a mix of both styles? Why are they written in a particular style?
• Interviews:  Discuss the methods you used during any interviews, and any results so far from interviews.  How did you prepare for interviews?  What types of questions did you ask? Did any types seem to work better?  As well as you can, summarize how your discoveries from interviews relate to the specific questions, concepts, and ideas that have guided your research up to this point.
• Observations:  Describe how you have observed this writer in the wild, and how you have observed the ways people work together in your workplace. What forms has your observation taken, and how much have you done so far?
• Other: Describe any other research methods that you have used so far, including the use of library or online sources. (Looking ahead a bit, remember that in the final draft of your final report, you must cite at least three clearly useful sources that you have discovered on your own. You may include one interview among these three, though of course, you can include in your final report reference to more than one interview; two other outside sources must be such items as articles, web sites, and so on).

In this section, explain the preliminary insights and realizations that you have discovered so far by collecting workplace writing samples, and by conducting interviews and observations.  Make sure to relate what you have come to understand so far in terms of any two of our major themes (individual/collaborative writing and the increasing usage of technology; socioeconomic class;  race/class/gender/sexuality relations; and professional/literary writing styles); you can also relate what you have discovered to any outside research sources, but that is not required at this point.

section four:  discussion

This is the place to wrap up your preliminary report by discussing:

• questions that arose that you haven't been able answer yet
• new questions that your research raised (that you don't necessarily have to answer) and/or new problems you discovered
• any preliminary recommendations you may have about the way writing and/or work gets done in your particular workplace

Finally, conclude with a look at the future--explain the kinds of research that you still need to do, and perhaps how much, in order to complete your final report.