Essay Writing Blog

The Difference Between an Essay and a Report

While being a student, be it in a high school or college, young people are facing a huge number of academic assignments. For decades, the most challenging types of tasks have been different forms of written assignments.

As a student, you will be (or already are) facing all types of reports, essay, and many other papers, each of which has its peculiarities and is challenging in its own way. But, while some tasks are generally easier to handle, others can really drive you nuts unless you buy essay or buy case study from professional writers, and one such example is a report essay.

Earlier, we mentioned reports and essays not without reason. In fact, there is no such thing as a report essay but, despite this fact, students often confuse these two different tasks and, thus, often find them too confusing and challenging. But the best assignment writing services are here to change it.

If you are still unsure what’s the difference between essay and report, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we are going to look at a report vs essay and dig deeper to help you finally understand how these two types of tasks are different and how to handle each of them. Let’s dive in!

Purpose of an Essay and a Report.

Essay vs report, so what is the difference? If you have never faced these types of works before, it can be rather easy to confuse them, especially if we are talking about a report and a reporting information essay (i.e., expository). These two papers can indeed look a bit similar, but it doesn’t mean that there is no difference between expository and informative.

To find this difference, let’s start by defining the core purpose of each of these two papers:


  • Essay - when writing an essay, the goal you will be pursuing depends primarily on whether it is a narrative, persuasive, descriptive, expository, or another type of essay. However, since most often, reports are being confused with an expository essay, you need to know that the purpose of this essay is to present factual information on a specific topic.


Report - the primary purpose of this paper is to report on a specific topic, and this is the most confusing part because an expository essay also aims to present factual information on a topic. Thus, the overall purpose can seem to be the same, but the difference is that each of these papers delivers information differently. Experts from the paper writing service say that the difference in the way these two papers deliver the information is probably the most obvious difference - if you look at a few reports essay examples, you will clearly see how an essay presents info in the form of plain text. In contrast, a report includes lots of factual data and numbers.

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Structure of an Essay and a Report.

Pondering about essay vs report and the difference between these two types of works, it is important to pay attention not only to the general purpose of each task but also to their structures. 

If you are wondering how to write a report essay, below is a brief overview of each paper’s structure that will help you see the difference between them.


The Structure of an Essay


The typical essay structure consists of the following elements:


  • Introduction


Essays typically start with a short intro that introduces the topic and gives a thesis statement.


  • Main Body


A standard essay includes 3-5 body paragraphs where the author provides the core information on the topic.


  • Conclusion


The last paragraph of an essay is a conclusion that summarizes the key points from the body of the paper.


  • List of References or Bibliography


Sometimes, a student can be asked to list the resources he used to write an essay. These resources are organized in the list of references or bibliography.


The Structure of a Report.

As a rule, reports follow an IMRaD structure, and, in fact, this is another big difference between a report and an essay that you might’ve not been aware of.

The typical structure of a report looks like this:

  • Table of Contents

  • Abstract or Executive Summary

  • Introduction

  • Literature Review

  • Methodology or Methods

  • Findings or Results

  • Interpretation, Analysis, or Discussion

  • Conclusion

  • Recommendations

  • Appendices

As you can see, a report is a longer and more complex type of work compared to an essay.


The reason you may not be able to do this is because of a lack of experience. Fortunately, there are services such as DoMyEssay, which you can ask "do my assignment" and they will take do the task instead of you!

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Reaching a Conclusion

As you should know now, an essay and an expository report are two very different types of academic papers that should not be confused.

Now, let’s quickly recap the two biggest distinctive features defined by our cheap essay writers that are there:

  1. The first big difference between a report and an essay is the purpose of these papers. As we said earlier, the purpose of both a report and an expository essay is the same - to present factual information on a specific topic. However, the way you present this information is very different as in an essay, you rely on words, while in a report, you rely a lot on data and numbers.

  2. The second significant distinctive feature is a report essay format and structure. As we discussed earlier, an essay only consists of an intro, body, conclusion, and (optionally) bibliography, whereas a report starts with a table of contents and includes such sections as an abstract or summary, introduction, literature review, methodology, findings, interpretation (or analysis, or discussion), conclusion, recommendations, and appendices.

Hopefully, reading this guide has helped you figure out the main distinctive features between essays and reports and, now, you will be able to cope with any of these tasks quicker and easier