How To Write a Good Lab Report
Most students write their lab reports to have something to turn in at the end of the day, while few aim to get a good grade. Specifically, a lab report is academic writing that allows you to demonstrate your understanding of the experiment that was performed earlier. It exhibits your discoveries, observations, and new learnings that you experienced from doing the research.
What you enter in your lab report notebook are your actual accounts about the experiment you had performed, that if you have discoveries or there’s a new development in the study you are doing, you can get back to it. Moreover, through lab reports, you will see and trace the development in the experiment you are practicing.
Unless you plan to order a lab report online, you have to get acquainted with how a good lab report is written, and you should know that it comes in three parts: the pre-lab, in-lab, and post-lab reports. Being able to distinguish them will enable you to organize your thoughts, claims, and discoveries properly.
Lab Report Writing Tips
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Writing your Pre-Lab Report
The pre-lab report generally consists of parts like an introduction, background of the study, the objective, the theories involved, and the procedures to undertake.
In the introduction, you will be discussing the problem that you want to investigate. It takes 4-5 sentences to develop it where your basic idea is clearly stated. It could be a paraphrase of an idea you extracted from the laboratory manual or concepts you written in your own words.
In the study background, you have to state why there’s a need to investigate it. You should be able to relate to past experiments and describe how they went. In this part, you can state your objectives and discuss in one sentence what you are expecting from the test you are about to perform.
Include in your lab report the procedures which you will follow in experimenting. Lastly, don’t forget to include the theory involved in the experiment, as this is your most reliable information that will support your claim.
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What to write in your In-Lab report
Your in-lab report contains the data that you have gathered and the observations that come with it. For a more detailed lab report, it is best to write and record everything you observed so that you always have something to revisit. Whatever you do during the experiment, this has to be documented in your lab report so that if anything goes wrong, you will be able to find out the culprit.
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Polishing your findings in your post-lab report
In this part, you will be writing the data, the calculations made and your conclusion regarding the experiment performed.
You will copy the data gathered and include the necessary calculations that made you end up with your conclusion. Rather than writing just the results as much as possible, you must consist of the formulas and estimates to demonstrate that your experimental results are valid.
In writing your conclusion, what you must include are the objective of your experiment, what you have discovered, and your thoughts about the outcome of the investigation.