College Lab Report Text

Jonathan Friesen - Writing Coach

writing lab reports and scientific papers

verbal communication is temporal and easily forgotten, but written reports exist for long periods and yield long term benefits for the author and others. Individual scientists perform experiments to test hypotheses about biological phenomena. After experiments are completed and duplicated, researchers attempt to persuade others to accept or reject their hypotheses by presenting the data and their interpretations. The lab report or the scientific paper is the vehicle of persuasion when it is published, it is available to other scientists for review. If the results stand up to criticism, they become part of the accepted body of scientific knowledge unless later disproved.

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The title should be less than ten words and should reflect the factual content of the paper. A good title is straightforward and uses keywords that researchers in a particular field will recognize. The purpose of an abstract is to allow the reader to judge whether it would serve his or her purposes to read the entire report.

A good abstract is a concise 100 to 200 words summary of the purpose of the report, the data presented, and the author's major conclusions. It must outline the scientific purpose s or objective s for the research performed and give the reader sufficient background to understand the rest of the report. Care should be taken to limit the background to whatever is pertinent to the experiment.

A good introduction will answer several questions, including the following: answers to this question may be derived from observations of nature or from the literature. what knowledge already exists about this subject? the answer to this question must review the literature, showing the historical development of an idea and including the confirmations, conflicts, and gaps in existing knowledge. what is the specific purpose of the study? the specific hypotheses and experimental design pertinent to investigating the topic should be described. As the name implies, the materials and methods used in the experiments should be reported in this section. The difficulty in writing this section is to provide enough detail for the reader to understand the experiment without overwhelming him or her. When procedures from a lab book or another report are followed exactly, simply cite the work, noting that details can be found in that particular source.

However, it is still necessary to describe special pieces of equipment and the general theory of the assays used. This can usually be done in a short paragraph, possibly along with a drawing of the experimental apparatus. Generally, this section attempts to answer the following questions: where and when was the work done? this question is most important in field studies. the results section should summarize the data from the experiments without discussing their implications.

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The data should be organized into tables, figures, graphs, photographs, and so on. All figures and tables should have descriptive titles and should include a legend explaining any symbols, abbreviations, or special methods used. Figures and tables should be numbered separately and should be referred to in the text by number, for example:

    figure 1 shows that the activity decreased after five minutes.
figures and tables should be self explanatory that is, the reader should be able to understand them without referring to the text.