As part of this course, you will write lab reports on one or more laboratory exercises and as part of your research project. A lab report should accomplish several key things:
It's important to understand that your lab report is not the same kind of writing as the experiments in your lab manual, which are for the most part more like an instruction manual or recipes in a cookbook. A lab report should read more like an article in a magazine or a section out of your astronomy textbook. Its purpose is to teach and convey results, not to give step-by-step directions. To summarize, a lab report should allow the reader to come to the same understanding that you did by doing your experiment or research project without having to do the project for themselves.
There are two points to having you write lab reports. The first is to teach communications skills, specifically how to convey a technical subject in writing. The second is that writing a lab report that conveys the things described above will force you to examine carefully all aspects of your project or lab experiment in a way that you might not do when merely filling out a worksheet and obtaining the correct answers, hopefully giving you a much better understanding of the principles involved in this course.
Your report should be divided up into logical sections in order to help the reader absorb the information more easily. I strongly suggest the following sections:
Points for structure are also awarded based on how logically your paper is written. Ideas should flow in a way that is not too confusing to the reader, and paragraphs should have clear main ideas and supporting sentences. Your own level of understanding of the experiment can make a big difference here.
While you may not be able to obtain perfectly accurate data in your experiments and projects, the conclusions you make from those results should make sense, and agree with the results from other sources if there are any. If you get a surprising result, you should carefully explain how you got it and why you believe it is correct, or why you were unable to get the correct answer.
You will also receive points for accuracy based on the correctness of your descriptions of the scientific basis of the project and the methods you used.
A lab report should be written in a formal, professional style. Slang, idioms or colloquialisms (conversational phrases) should be avoided. Correct grammar, spelling and punctuation should be adhered to, and words should be used correctly according to their definitions. Lab reports should be typed in a word processing program and formatted in a clear, simple style. Equations should be entered in a readable form using an equation editing tool (I'm happy to give assistance with this). Charts, figures and graphs should be printed out, not drawn in, and should be have captions or text explaining them. Worksheets from your lab manual should not be included as part of your lab report.
It can seem difficult to know where to begin when writing a lab report. If you feel lost when trying to put it all together, start by writing an outline. Write down the sections described above or sketch out a few main ideas, then fill in details as you can in each section, moving from general ideas to more specific. Write a rough draft of your paper, then print it out and read it with a red pen in hand, making marks and notes about what needs to be changed. Then make your changes and do it again.
As always, if you have any troubles or questions about your lab reports, see me as soon as possible and we'll try to resolve them.