NCJ Number
183929
Date Published
2000
Length
92 pages
Annotation
This presentation of report-writing essentials meets and exceeds all performance objectives for police report writing prescribed by the California Commission of Peace Officer Standards and Training for the basic academy course.
Abstract
This is done by dealing with a broad range of police report-writing problems that have been specifically identified by extensive research and empirical data as being the greatest cause of confusing police reports. Seven of the eight chapters address aspects of correct grammar and sentence structure. Nouns and pronouns are defined and illustrated in Chapter 1, followed by a chapter on verbs and subject verb agreement; regular and irregular verbs are defined, as is verb tense. First-person sentence construction, sentence subject, and pronoun-antecedent are defined as well. Chapter 3 focuses on modifiers and sentence structure. Topics covered in this chapter include adjectives, adverbs, modifiers, complete sentences, run-on sentences, and comma splice. A chapter on punctuation addresses comma and apostrophe usage; the forming of possessives; and parentheses, brackets, dashes, hyphens, colons, semi-colons, and quotation marks. Other chapters on grammar focus on capitalization, abbreviations, and spelling; active voice, chronological order, and word choice; and paragraphing, jargon, slang, facts, inferences, and opinions. The concluding chapter describes the process of police report writing. Appendixes contain answers to "practices," and samples of "bad, good and better reports."