When you are doing technical research, you will always need to frame the results of your work in the form of a report.
When you need to write a lab report, you must include your hypothesis that you have tested, the methodology you have used during your work, describe the results you have achieved, analyze and discuss this data, and draw conclusions.
This article will give you useful tips to help you write a technical lab report.
Elements of a lab report and tips for writing them
Title
Your title should be informative and convey the essence of your work. After reading it, the reader should understand whether your work is of interest to them.
Moreover, the title should include keywords that will allow your paper to be found in indexing services.
Always check with your professors or editors about how you should design the title page of your report.
Abstract
This section is essentially a summary of your report. It should include all the constituent elements of your report. This part summarizes all the main conclusions and introduces the reader to the hypotheses and methods.
Try to present all of this information in a concise manner and devote no more than one sentence to each section.
Introduction
Before you begin writing your report, you should research the audience that will read your report. This will help determine the language in which you will write.
In the introduction, you must describe the relevance and value of your work, as well as present the hypothesis and explain the appropriateness of testing it.
If necessary, you must provide additional material that will help readers understand the significance of your contribution to the development of this industry.
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Materials and methods
Make sure you write this section as responsibly as possible.
It is a manual for anyone who may want to replicate your experiment.
That’s why it is important to describe in detail and qualitatively explain everything that you used in your experiment, as well as to provide steps in chronological order, which should be taken to achieve the desired goal.
Any deviation from your actions will lead to a different result.
In this section, you should also provide arguments that prove that your method is ideal for testing your hypothesis and obtaining reliable results.
As a rule, the passive voice is recommended in academic texts. This way of writing helps to focus on the materials and the actions performed, abstracting from the doer of the actions.
Recently, however, it has become more common to use the active voice. You should clarify these points with your editor or instructor before writing your paper.
Results
This chapter presents readers with the results of your experiment without interpretation since you will be explaining them in another section.
It is essentially the information you need to prove or disprove your hypothesis. You can present the data in chronological order, or you can phrase it in terms of the importance of testing your hypothesis.
Try to give only the data that is really important to the experiment. If you omit any of the data, explain why you do so.
It is extremely important not to exaggerate results or distort them, even though this may support your hypothesis. We recommend providing information in the form of tables, graphs, or charts.
This makes it easier for the reader to understand your results. You can help the audience absorb the information through written explanations.
Discussion
It is in this part of the lab report that you interpret the results of your study and analyze how well they support your hypothesis.
Don’t get frustrated and think that your work was in vain if your results are controversial or don’t support your hypothesis.
It only provides a basis for further research. If your results do not meet your expectations, you should try to find reasons why this is the case.
Conclusion
In the final section of your paper, you must convince your audience of the relevance and value of your research.
Typically, this section consists of 1-2 small paragraphs where you go back to the purpose of your experiment, the hypothesis, and present the main conclusions you came to.
References
You’ve probably used tons of sources and literature for your experiment.
You should reference all of them in your paper.
Before you start making a list of references, you should check with your instructor or editor about the citation styles you need to use for your footnotes and reference list.
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Appendixes
If there is information in your lab report that does not fit the main sections of your paper, but you can’t mention it, you can add it to this section.
So, for example, if you only present generalized data in the results section, you can provide more detailed information in the appendixes section.
This could be tables, graphs, protocols, or any explanations of your methods.
It is important to remember that if you add something to this section, you should be sure to reference it in your report. With the references, the reader will know where to find more detailed information.
Acknowledgments
This section is not always appropriate or relevant, but if you have someone to thank for any assistance with your technical experiment, you can devote a few paragraphs to those people and express your gratitude.
General tips
In order to make it easier for you to create your report, we suggest that you keep detailed records of all the activities that you do.
Make it a rule to keep some kind of diary of your observations and actions as you work on your experiment.
Depending on your expectations and hypothesis, you can develop a spreadsheet to make it easier for you to enter all the data there.
Sometimes, instructors give their students ready-made guides to technical lab work.
Never rely solely on your memory if you know you have a lab report to write. Your notes will make up 90% of your report.
