Lab Reports

• Be tidy. As a rule, unless otherwise instructed, in technical writing that will be evaluated or reviewed you should always use double-spacing.

• Importance of an Introduction... In any communication - oral or written - there ought to be a 3-part structure: Introduction, Main Body, Conclusion. The purpose of the Introduction is to gather the reader's attention, remind him/her what s/he is about to read, let him decide if he is interested, set the stage... the Introduction ideally achieves a focusing of the reader's mind from the infinity of all possible thoughts and distractions to something specific you have to say.

  It is a mistake to assume an Introduction is not needed. On the other hand there is no formula for an Introduction, other than avoiding dullness, repetition. Can you start out with something imaginitive, something individual, something provocative? A question? A hypothesis?

• Try to be aware explicitly of your own style. Do I use an essay style or a point style? Are my figures artistic? Or are they, rather, rigorous/technical? Does my work give a good visual impression?

• One of the key challenges in writing is to give the reader a sense of pace, that s/he is rapidly and efficiently traversing your material. How do you achieve this? Again, there is no recipe, but these things help:
  • Use carefully chosen, informative headings (but don't go overboard with sub-sub-sub headings)
  • Be conscious and intentional about the effectiveness of your transitions from one paragraph to the next. If you don't know what this means, maybe do some reading; a good writer has a sense of natural transition from one paragraph to the next.
  • Be compact
  • Use Tables and Figures creatively and informatively - with suitably detailed titles and legends - to save space. Represent and identify variables by introducing - and defining - some compact symbol.
  • Separate your Tables and Diagrams distinctly from your text, and give them detailed legends. In your text, specifically direct the reader's attention to each Table and Diagrams in turn, by number, and whenever appropriate: eg. "Please refer to Figure 1 (attached) for my results... '' Your objective is to make it easy for the reader to follow the flow of your logic in the main text.
  • In particular, a stack of Tables and Graphs stuffed one after the other and stapled together does not make for an effective report. It is your job as writer to provide the logical connexions ("signposts") for the reader. One might call this task the "integration" of your technical results, as captured in your Tables and Graphs, into a coherent report.
  • Consider the use of appendices where appropriate. The utility of an appendix is that one may refer the interested reader to it for detailed discussion, but still offer him/her the option to postpone what amounts to a distraction from the pace and line of thought you are aiming for in your main text. For example, a Fortran porgram listing should be given in the form of an appendix, not in your main text.

• Use a computer graphing program. Go wild in labelling graphs and figures and tables. Label all axes as completely and helpfully as you can, giving units, of course. Add a title.

• Take the trouble to check your spelling and grammar.

• Have a friend read over your report and give you feeback.

• Give a FLOWCHART of your computer program (probably in an Appendix)

• For computing assignments that entail a 2-dimensional grid with complex boundary conditions, it is advantageous in your write-up to give a detailed diagram of a region of the grid, defining the axes, symbols, indices ("I,J,..."), locations of gridpoints and cell faces, labels of faces ("w,e,n,s..."), and so forth.

References on Writing

The more conscious you are about your writing, the better it is likely to be (and, hopefully, the more you will find pleasure in writing). How about consulting a primer on writing/technical writing? There are many excellent books - to list a few:

• Communicating in Science, Booth
• Writing Clear Paragraphs, Donald et al.
• Style: toward clarity and grace, Williams
• The Elements of Style, Strunk & White (a classic)
• Words, Sentences, Paragraphs, Essays, Moyles & Logan

Final Comment

If this seems impossibly vague, please consider this: before committing his or her writing for review and publication, does the novelist know what will be the public's reception of the work? Is the recording artist assured in advance his or her art will be welcomed? No. And neither do we, in science, have any choice but to commit ourselves to our own judgement.

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Last Modified: 17 Jan. 2007