Tag Archive for 'Report Writing'

Disappearing & Invisible Ink

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on August 6, 2009
in Handwriting, Methods and Report Writing
. 1 Comment

MOSSAD PEN

This writes like a normal pen, but if you heat the paper the written words disappear. Putting the paper in the freezer makes the words reappear.

RUSSIAN KGB DISAPPEARING INK PEN

This pen features a special gel ink developed by real KGB scientists during the Cold War (and made in Russia), that disappears completely. Because it is a gel pen, you don’t need to press hard which prevents paper indenting.

UV Sensitive INK PEN

I guess every good spy needs to have his missives disappear, but I  need to secretly mark documents for later reference.

Pens like this have been  around for quite some time.  The Fisher Space Pen was at one time offered with UV Sensitive Ink refills. I occasionally use UV sensitive ink to mark important documents for security purposes.

Quantity Over Quality

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on August 4, 2009
in How to Become a Professional Private Investigator, News and Report Writing
. 0 Comments

In the past US security clearance investigations were falsified. Now we learn that they have too many background checks to do, and not enough time to do them and the solution is to produce factually correct but incomplete reports. We also see that this job is a “shredder, and agents are grist for the mill,”.

 “This job is a shredder, and agents are grist for the mill,” said K.C. Smith, an OPM investigator in Austin, Texas, with 23 years of experience. “There are people who are getting sick, under a lot of stress, their family life is suffering. They are just beat down.”

Investigators say it is common practice to spend nights, weekends and holidays writing up reports, and some don’t report the overtime they work for fear it will be held against them in their performance evaluations.

 Investigators say it is common practice to spend nights, weekends and holidays writing up reports, and some don’t report the overtime they work for fear it will be held against them in their performance evaluations.

Some say their superiors have made it clear that the priority is to close cases, and they say they have felt pressure to turn in even incomplete cases that lack crucial interviews or records if it will help them keep their numbers up. A recent Government Accountability Office report found that the Defense Department’s security clearance process is plagued by such incomplete cases: 87 percent of the 3,500 initial top-secret security clearance cases Defense approved last year were missing at least one interview or important record.

Investigators are rewarded for investigation reports, not for doing proper investigations.

Orwell’s 5 Rules for Effective Writing

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on March 20, 2009
in Communication, How to Become a Professional Private Investigator and Report Writing
. 0 Comments

Poor writing is not a recent problem. In 1946, George Orwell wrote his essay, Politics and the English Language, about his five rules of writing effectively.  Orwell concluded that if you follow his five rules, then you would distinguish yourself by clearly communicating your ideas.

Orwell’s Rules

  1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech seen in print.
  2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

Texter

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on March 16, 2009
in Communication, Power User Tips, Report Writing and The Investigator's Computer
. 1 Comment

Texter saves you countless keystrokes by replacing abbreviations with commonly used phrases that you define. It runs in the Windows system tray and works with applications you’re typing in. It can also set return-to markers for your cursor and insert clipboard contents into your replacement text, in addition to more advanced keyboard macros.

How did I ever live without this?

Fact Checking

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on February 13, 2009
in Communication, How to Become a Professional Private Investigator, Methods, Private Investigator and Report Writing
. 0 Comments

Every writer, reporter, and investigator should read the article entitled Checkpoint by award-winning author John McPhee in the Feb. 9-16, 2009 issue of New Yorker Magazine . The abstract is available, but you must be a subscriber to read the full article online. Of course, you could go to the library and read the article, or just buy the magazine.

Open Channel D

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on January 23, 2009
in Notebooks, Private Investigator, Report Writing and The Investigator's Computer
. 1 Comment

The Pen Communicator from the Man from U.N.C.L.E. TV series would connect agents Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin with U.N.C.L.E. headquarters in New York City if they said the phrase “Open Channel D”.  It also included amnesia inducer and electronic scanner functions.

Now we have the Pulse smartpen that records conversations and indexes them to what you write using special notebook paper. It doesn’t take much imagination to think of ways one might use this during investigations.

Secret Laser Printer ID Codes

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on July 18, 2008
in Forgery, Privacy, Private Investigator, Report Writing and Security
. 0 Comments

This is not a new issue. A 2004 PC World article described the technology. In February, 2008, I wrote about the EU concerns that these secret printer ID codes may break EU Privacy laws. The EFF has a list of the printers that print these secret codes used by the US government to match a document to the laser printer that produced it.

Another article about this appeared in USA Today a few days ago.

Printer dots raise privacy concerns

The dots, invisible to the naked eye, can be seen using a blue LED light and are used by authorities such as the Secret Service to investigate counterfeit bills made with laser printers…

Privacy advocates worry that the little-known technology could ensnare political dissidents, whistle-blowers or anyone who prints materials that authorities want to track.

The dots are produced only on laser devices and not ink-jet printers, which are most commonly used at home…

As an investigator, this might present an opportunity if the dot pattern is consistent enough to be matched to a particular printer or printer type without being able to decode the dots. If this were the case, then you might not need the ability to decode the dots in some instances. For example, at a company with many different types of laser printers. The process of elimination might indicate which printer(s) could have created a document.

Three Dimensions of Note-taking

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on June 30, 2008
in Notebooks, Private Investigator and Report Writing
. 0 Comments

Steve Osborne’s article, Ultimate Note-Taking: Capture Text, Audio and Visual Notes, provides some good pointers on taking good notes using audio, images, and handwritten notes.

Don’t be Sloppy with Metadata or You’ll Get This

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on June 13, 2008
in Company Research, Competitive Intelligence, Due Diligence, Private Investigator and Report Writing
. 2 Comments

Kroll’s sleuths are more Clouseau than Columbo

Inspector Clouseau is alive and well, and he works for Kroll Associates, the corporate spies who are supposed to specialise in finding, and keeping, company secrets.

…in fact, it is so boring that after downloading it I took to reading the ‘metadata’ concealed with the electronic document that tells you who wrote the report, why and when.The results were considerably more interesting than you might imagine. The report’s ‘properties’ field listed three Texas-based oil and gas exploration companies and the names of seven men - none of which has anything to do with the North Carolina Highway Patrol. What is more, the subject line mentioned the term ‘due diligence investigation’, which is corporatespeak for the type of inquiry often carried out by firms like Kroll when a company is considering a takeover.

The Write Resource

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on January 23, 2008
in Communication, Private Investigator and Report Writing
. 0 Comments

This is something that makes me think, “why didn’t I think of that?”. I found it on the Sources And Methods blog.

Newsroom101.com. This site has a ton of easy to do exercises to improve your grammar, spelling and punctuation. Designed for journalists (with the AP style in mind) the site is almost just as useful to intelligence analysts who have to learn to write in the concise style of a journalist. I also like the way the exercises are put together. If you get the right answer, the site doesn’t bore you with the details. If you get the wrong answer, however, the site lets you know what you did wrong and why immediately.

The Job’s Not Done Until The Paperwork Is Finished

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on November 24, 2007
in Handwriting, Methods, Notebooks, Private Investigator and Report Writing
. 0 Comments

I once reviewed of an organization’s investigation practices and found a wide range of competence and quality in the investigations, the reporting, and record keeping.

The Investigator’s notes must truly reflect what he did. It is remarkable how quickly the mind loses its ability to recall the details of events. The realisation that unrecorded events become forgotten or distorted with the passage of time was missing in the notes of most of the investigations I examined. The final report often described events that were not in the file notes. From this practice, questions arise about the nature of the sources used and when facts were uncovered.

It is prudent practice to ensure that investigation notes do not contain anything unrelated to the investigation. Nor is it wise to record derogatory data without recording its source. To do otherwise, risks a loss of objectivity that discredits investigation and the Investigator. However, I frequently found the subject referred to by pejorative terms that could not be attributed to any source. Also found in the file notes were grocery lists, telephone numbers of unrelated parties, the office lunch take-out order, and the telephone numbers of massage parlours and prostitutes entirely unrelated to the investigation.

One Investigator stood-out from the rest. When questioned about his practices, he admitted to pruning the deadwood from his files before the release of the final report. He also used 32 page notebooks for all his file notes – you know the type, the ones your kids use at school. This conveniently kept all his notes in an organized fashion. I checked Staples and found a package containing four of these for $0.77. I now use this excellent low-cost solution to “note pollution”.

This “pruning the deadwood” should extend to the electronic files. In the meta data of a final report, I found that a lawyer (at the organization’s law firm) had edited what became an investigation report. The file notes did not support the lawyer’s changes to the report, nor was the lawyer on the distribution list for the report.

In some environments, it is standard practice to use normal word processing applications to produce and then print a document, which is then scanned into PDF to avoid any embarrassing problems with meta data. Once printed and scanned, the original word processing file is deleted and overwritten.

Remember, the job’s not done until the paperwork is finished.

Writing is Hard Work

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on November 20, 2007
in Communication, Report Writing, Sources and Training & Education
. 1 Comment

Anybody who writes reports should have some books at hand to learn from, and for reference.

My first and best recommendation is William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. Then a serious study of The Modern Researcher by Jacques Barzun is a must. Barzun may not be pleasant reading, but he has guided untold graduate students successfully through the theses writing process. If you haven’t noticed, good investigation reporting has a lot in common with academic writing.

The Oxford English Dictionary, in some form, and Fowler’s Modern English Usage are absolutely necessary reference works. Fowler’s sorts out questions of usage. For example, when does one use licence instead of license (the first is a noun, while the second is a verb) or when to use iterate, reiterate, and reiterant.

Three more books make my list of required reading in this area:

  • The Craft of Research by Booth, et al.
  • A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations by Turabian, et al. (an easier read than Barzun)
  • How to Write a Lot by Paul J. Silvia. An excellent section of how to avoid pompous writing is worth the price of the book alone.

An article titled THE BOSS CAN’T WRITE by Philip Quinn, appearing in the Financial Post on Wednesday, November 14, 2007, illustrates the difficulties faced by employees and businesses due to poor literacy skills.

Shorthand for the Investigator

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on May 7, 2007
in Communication, Handwriting, Methods, Private Investigator, Report Writing and Shorthand
. 0 Comments

Most people can write 35 words per minute. However, most students after 1 year of instruction can not write 60 words per minute (wpm) using Gregg or Pitman shorthand. After two years of instruction, half will not reach 80 wpm. Now you know why shorthand was the most frequently failed course and is no longer taught in High School. It is not a matter of shorthand being obsolete, especially for the Investigator or Reporter. It relates to the basic failure of these systems to be easily taught, and more importantly, retained.

A usable system based on the roman alphabet, rather than an obscure and entirely different alphabet, shortens the learning curve. It also lets the student instantly write short forms for the 10 most common English words, which make-up about one quarter of all the words we use. In business correspondence, we normally use only 422 words according to some experts.

An alphabetic system that uses very few symbols, and easily understood rules, should get most people to 80 wpm if it concentrates on the most common words. Such a system may be easily transcribed years later as it will follow certain rules and it uses our normal alphabet. Alphabetic shorthand systems fall back on longhand to define an abbreviation or where clarity is important. These two considerations are critical to any type of Investigator. Investigation notes and notebooks must be accurate, complete, legible, and usable years after the investigation has been completed. The system must also be adaptable to the type of notebooks normally used to record the investigation’s progress. Gregg, Pitman and even Teeline shorthand are far less adaptable to the small notebooks used by Investigators.

Don’t resist learning to write this type of shorthand. Unlike traditional symbol-based shorthand, you won’t fail the course. Failure here only means you will improve your note-taking speed by only two times instead of three. This system won’t make you a court reporter or Hansard recorder, but it will make you a better Investigator.

There are a few shorthand systems like this, but the easiest to use and the least expensive to learn (in time and money) is the Quickhand system. At $25.50 from Wiley in Canada or at Amazon on our Book Page.

Quickhand A Self-Teaching Guide
ISBN: 9780471328872
Author: Grossman, Jeremy
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, New York
Author: Grossman, Jeremy
Publication Date: February 1976
Binding: Paperback
Illustrations: Yes
Pages: 152
Dimensions: 9.96×6.74x.38 in. .61 lbs.