Air Force Writer EPR


How to Write an EPR

The Accomplishment

The Accomplishments: This is the meat and potatos of the EPR. I use the term accomplishments but you can call them anything you want. Most people call them bullet statements. A bullet statement is a sentence fragment that concisely describes the accomplishment. Bullet statements are the required format for EPRs.

Bullets statement structure: Part 1. Identify the accomplishment. Part 2. Describe the accomplishment's positive effect.

Example: Washed over 1,000 airplanes until they looked like new--sold squadron aircraft for twice their value

More examples:

People often have to write their own EPRs or at least provide their own bullet statements. This is normal and it's in the ratee's interest to provide the best bullets possible. Thinking up 19 accomplishments (13 for the Rater's Comments block and 6 for the Additional Rater's Comments block) can be hard. At times it can seem almost impossible. The things we do everyday don't seem noteworthy. But they are. The work that all of us do is indispensable. It just takes a little thought to bring it to light.

The quickest and most effective way to develop those 19 bullets is to brainstorm first. List all the ratee's accomplishments on a separate sheet of paper. Jot down everything that might qualify as a bullet. Nothing is too small or off-limits. Don't be shy about claiming responsibility for single-handedly upholding democracy in the free world. There is a fairly wide margin allowed for stretching the truth in these reports. Make sure off-duty education, duty qualification, community involvement, and training is addressed too. Then, when you have roughly nineteen accomplishments, go back to the form and start fitting them in. If you try to think up accomplishments one at a time, edit them for readability, and make them fit in the space provided as you go along, your progress will be very slow.

The best accomplishments are those that somehow support your unit's mission. Try to relate your accomplishments to the goal of your unit.

Quantify! The overall goal of the EPR is to, as accurately as possible, describe a person's performance. To that end, every statement should be "qualified"; every claim should be supported by a quantity. For example, consider the bullet statement:

Treated sick dogs and cats--prevented spread of communicable disease

The number of dogs and cats should be listed --if that makes the bullet stronger. If 95 out of 100 possible dogs and cats were treated, it would be more beneficial to describe the quantity as a percentage --95% of base pets treated. Prevented the spread of communicable disease? Where? How far? Could it have saved lives? It might be better to say "saved estimated 30 lives".

Prioritize! Often EPR reviewers are harried and can't afford to spend as much time as they'd like reading individual EPRs. So, knowing that we must grab their attention in the first few lines, the best accomplishments or bullet statements should be listed first --at the top. The next important accomplishment would be second and so on until you reach the Completed CDCs bullet at the bottom.

Different organizations have different requirements as to format. Most require the bullet statements to start with a single dash (-) and supporting bullet statements start with a double dash (--).

Start each bullet statement with a verb: repaired, aligned, managed, rescued, etc.

Write the bullet statement so that anyone can understand it. The EPR may be reviewed at boards consisting of NCOs from a variety of career fields so it must be understandable for a broad audience --not only someone from your background

Be specific as possible. “Participated in” could mean anything from “showed up” to “managed the operation.”

Note: Don't leave a lot of white space or unused space at the end of a bullet statement. Officially, white space is OK. Because the goal is to accurately describe the ratee's performance with no unnecessary clutter so inevitably white space will naturally occur. But, if you want to go the extra mile, if you want to demonstrate that your troop is important to you and worthy of a good rating, this is where you can demonstrate a little extra effort. Reword the statement so that there is no more than five or six spaces at the end of each statement. Make that block just chock full of text --as if you just couldn't say enough good things about this character. When the Additional Rater or future reviewers of the EPR see how well it was written and how someone labored over it, it should make them realize that this person was viewed as a person worth the effort. In real life though, even if you do spend an extra couple of hours consuming all the white space, it could all be lost if the chain of command edits it.

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