What is Report Text? An Example of Report Text

Have you learnt about what is report text? There are many pupils who sometimes confuse Because, report text is similar to the descriptive text. Report text is a text that describes something in general. Every text has a communicative purpose. Communicative purpose of report text is to present information about something in general.

Report text has two generic structures. The first is general classification it is usually in the first paragraph of the text. This part usually introduces the topic of the report or tells what phenomenon under discussion is. It can be a short description of the subject or it can be definitions from the subject that is described. The second is, description. In this part, we usually will describe the details of the topic or subject such as physical appearance, parts, qualities, habits or behaviour. Every paragraph in the part of description usually gives us information about one feature of the subject,

Generic Structure of Report Text

1. General classification: Stating classification of general aspect of thing; animal, public place, plant, etc which will be discussed in general
2. Description: Describing the thing which will be discussed in detail; part per part , customs or deed for living creature and usage for materials and things

So, what is report text? Below is example of report text with title ‘School’:

School is a building for children who want to study. School is an institution for formal education and designed for the teaching of students or pupils under the supervision from the educators or teachers. At school, students can learn anything, for example, mathematics, English, science, social, physics, biology, and art. Students go to school in the morning and start their lessons at 07.30 o’clock. They have ninety minutes for every subject that they studied. At school, students can interact with their friend, make relationship and students are also educated to become a better person and expected to have a good personality. A student may not come late or truant the school. If students do those things it can be assumed as an offense and students can be punished.

There are so many rules at school that cannot be broken and must be followed by all students. School usually have many classrooms. Besides that, there are library, mosque, and canteen for lunch, teacher’s office, field for sports and etc. School has to be a comfort and pleasure place for students because students will spend most of their time at school.

After you read the example of the text above, I am sure you have already understand about ‘what is report text?’. If we look this text at a glance, report text is similar with descriptive text but, actually there is a big difference between two of them. The difference is in report text we describe something in general but in descriptive text, we describe something specifically. We can guess which one of the text is report text is from the title. For example, there are two texts with the titles, ‘the school’ and ‘my school’. From this, we can know which one is report text. ‘The school’ is described in general so it is report text but ‘my school’, it is special, because it is only ‘my school’, so it is descriptive text.

Language Feature of Report Text
• Introducing group or general aspect

• Using conditional logical connection; when, so, etc
• Using simple present tense