How To Write A Lab Report

Writing a lab report is a pretty simple thing.  Unless you are told to use a specific format follow the time honored adage of, “Tell me what you are going to tell me, tell me, and tell me what you told me.”  Looking at the components of this expression:

Tell me what you are going to tell me – Write an introduction

Explain the big picture.  What problem or project are you presenting?  Explain the scope of the work if applicable.

Tell me – The body of the work

Present what you did, generally with enough detail that the work could be repeated for verification.  Include subsections as needed for setup, equipment, software flow control(algorithm), operating procedures, or data reduction.

In any written work you should consider your audience first.  The document is almost never for you.  What is the audience looking for?   If the point of the work is to sell something, then you will want to write about how it will save the customer time, labor, or materials and ultimately cost.  That justifies the purchase.  If the work is educational, then you want to explain the underlying theory and how the theory was applied in the experiment.  Ultimately your grade should reflect how well you demonstrated mastery of the material to your instructor.  If you show that you understand all the important underlying concepts, but then make small mistakes like a math error, it’s much easier for an instructor to justify grading with leniency.

Whenever you have calculations to perform write out the equations and define each term.

Tell me what you told me – Write a conclusion

What did you learn?  Did the data from an experiment match any predictions?  What future work should be done?  Did anything happen that would make your data unreliable?

General rules for good writing

As you write the sections of your document always remember to do the following:

  1. If you add a picture or diagram give it a numerical title such as, “Figure 1”.  Any time you add a diagram, be sure to talk about it and tell the reader why it is significant and the message they should get from it.
  2. NEVER USE “I” OR “ME”!!!!  Writing a technical paper is meant to educate an audience.  They don’t care about you.  They care about becoming better educated for the time they have invested.   Instead of writing, “I tested a pressure vessel until it failed.” write “A pressure vessel was tested to failure.”
  3. The report should be written in the passive voice.
  4. Any data that you researched and used should be cited either in the body or as an end note.
  5. Avoid slang, colloquialisms, sarcasm, and unsubstantiated critiques.  Reports are ALWAYS formal documents.  Never write something like, “The U.S. economy is currently at 4.1% unemployment and is projected to remain there unless we have the mother of all wars.”  The last comment is inappropriate for a formal document.
  6. Run spell check.  This may seem obvious but it is still a problem.
  7. Use complete sentences.  A sentence always has a noun and a verb.
  8. Write out numbers less than three words.  “40” should be written as “forty”.  “7894.45” is acceptable as digits.
  9. If an equation is a critical part of something you are testing, write it out and define the terms involved.  Do not use cell phone pictures of hand written formulas.
  10. Don’t use imprecise values such as “The rate of inflation is 2-3%”.  If the topic has a defined value, use it.  Instead write, “The one hundred year historical average for the rate of inflation in the United States is 3.22%”
  11. Leave subjective evaluations out of a technical paper. Let the reader draw their own conclusion or guide them to a conclusion with honest data.
  12. Capitalize the first letter in a sentence. (I can’t believe I have to say that to college seniors!)

Examples:

Here is a professional report written by Lockheed for the XH-51 program.

Here is  the template for the MEE443 measurement labs.

.