Field Report Draft Preparation
Preparing Your Field Report
Narrative writing is a key element in the various writing (and reading) tasks that you will engage in your criminal justice career. You will see that we are now engaging that narrative further and mobilizing it in the field report that you are looking at this week.

As we finalize the drafts of the narratives, you should also be seeing how the narrative fits the field report, and how it is so integral to the story that is told in the report.

You have each chosen a particular character to profile in Units 1 and 2. That character aligns with a subfield of criminal justicea career path, in other words. Using that career path, find an appropriate report for the field to complete (you may use the textbooks, the library, and the internet to help you, but please do ask the instructor for help with this, as well, if you need it). You will likely find a form or template-like model to follow for many of these positions, but for some (like attorneys), you will not have forms to fill out.

For the assignment in the upcoming unit, you will write a field report that follows one of the models of the reports a criminal justice professional is likely to write on a regular basis, similar to what you learned about this character from your profile in Units 1 and 2. You may have many reports to choose from for some characters, and few for others. This is natural.

PART 2

For this assignment, you will finalize your field report draft submitted in the previous unit’s discussion. Building upon what you learned in the Unit 6 study for this assignment’s preparation as well as the Profile and the Narrative assignments, choose one type of field report and draft it. You may be drafting a police incident report, an internal affairs investigation report, a parole report, et cetera. You may find and use a template for the report, as appropriate.

You should expect to write between 2 and 7 pages, depending upon the type of report you are completing and its purpose; and you should complete the following tasks to draft your report:

Write a report to satisfy the chosen purpose, making appropriate use of detail and presenting information clearly, fairly, and persuasively.
Apply strategies for structuring the field report effectively.
Use the accepted style and form of the field report to develop a central point in an organized document.
Incorporate peer and instructor feedback into a revised, proofread, and polished document.
In addition, be sure you meet the following requirements:

Requirements
Written communication: Writing should be free of errors that detract from the overall message.
Style: Use formal current APA style and formatting.
Length of paper: 27 pages.
Sources: Use source material appropriate to the report you are completing, such as witness statements, officer observation accounts, lab data, et cetera.
Font: Arial, 10 point.
Be sure to include an APA cover page and add a references list at the end of the document for any citations you need to include for sources you have used to produce the report. Your references list should include the source of the template or model report or form, the sources of information you used (if you did not make it up yourself), and any other relevant sources you have employed for the document.