I've never been a fan of "canned" reports because they use an "addititve" approach rather than "combinative" one. A dash of this and a dollop of that piled one on top of the other. But it takes me forever to write up a natal report from scratch, so I've been taking the editable stuff, building a report skeleton with it, and then fleshing it out with my own interpretation (building my own text library in the process). The New Age psychological basis of the material that came with the Deluxe Report Writer takes way too much dismantling and reconstructing, so I was wondering whether the British Astro Report was at least marginally less "fluffy." I think I did see a sample paragraph or two and it seemed workable for my purpose.
John has samples on his web page that you can read (and I think download in pdf format. They are for QEII and Barack Obama but they give a sense of what you get for your $40. Bearing in mind these are drawn from several authors, you then have the task of sifting through for the bits that you want to keep or discard. Here's the link to the Obama report.
http://www.halloran.com/BObama2.htm
I used to find that when I tried to do a modern Astrology reading, I had pages and pages of notes on minor aspects, planets in houses, planets in signs, harmonics, etc. And, according to the textbooks, I had to 'integrate' it to produce an overall picture.
One of the things that surprised me when I started out on Traditional Astrology was that the huge natal report (sometimes 50 pages or more) just did not exist. It's a product fo the computer era and the view that the chart needs to yield a reading of an integrated psyche.
Lilly's natal analysis in Christian Astrology Book III takes but 19 pages (bear in mind that was in a type face that was larger than modern ones) He devotes over 60 pages to a year by year set of predictions. (My guess is that he would not normally have done that but is writing to illustrate his techniques in a textbook. I would think that normally he would do one or two years at most).
His nineteen pages consist of four page on temperament or personality (yes
four pages) and the remainder looks at the other eleven houses, though not in sequence. He looks at 'riches', 'bretheren', parents', 'sickness and servants; 'marriage', 'children' travels, 'profession and magistracy', 'friends', 'imprisonment' and 'death'. A sequence that seems to hang together quite well, though these days we might not bother with 'imprisonment' - Lilly only gives in nine lines - and we are too sensitive to talk about death and its quality. The longest sections tend to be on marriage, children, and career, which fits into the modern context quite well.
Again, I wouldn't think he would do all those areas for a client, unless asked to cover them. A reading would cover temperament, riches, marriage, children, parents and family and career, unless he was asked for something else.
I found that my own readings improved dramatically, when I stopped trying to integrate everything and concentrated on temperament and then later added in the key topics (in the opinion of the sitter). Suddenly the clutter of endless data could be organised on a 'proper' basis. Getting rid of the outers and the minor aspects also reduced the clutter to a manageable list, capable of being organised and applied where it mattered.
There isn't a need to integrate a chart - though personality will have significance for some other areas of life and needs to be related to them, in the reading. But not everything is meant to fit together or form a unified whole. Even at a psychological level our mind isn't an integrated whole, we have conflicting urges, thoughts, reactions, etc and these aren't necessarily consistent over time. Our minds aren't random but they aren't either mechanisms, organisms in their own right, or computer programs. There are unifying forces and predispositions but they don't eliminate conflicts or contradictions.
Extend that to life as a whole and you can see that integration beyond the general is not going to work.
