A lab report is used as a general form of communication in the scientific field. It allows researchers to share their findings with each other. Hence, it is important that your work is clear and is sufficiently able to convey your findings to others in the community.
A well-written lab report takes several hours to write and the guys at lab report writing service actually put their time in writing an awesome report. So, if you want to write as a high-quality report as they are providing then it is important to set aside enough time before you start writing your report. Your lab report should be able to clearly demonstrate that you have understood the work and what it aims to teach you. Your work should have sufficient details, analysis as well as the appropriate measures. It should show that your scientific inquiry was well thought out and straightforward.
A clear and concise Title
An efficient title should be straightforward, informative, and indicate exactly what you have studied. It should not be too long or too short; rather, it should be a concise phrase which should include keywords that pertain to your experiment or research. If you find that your title is too long, that is it takes up more than one line, you can reduce it by taking out any words or phrases that are not essential to the topic. A concise title helps the reader clearly understand what the lab report is going to discuss.
A condensed Abstract that is informative
An abstract is a shortened version or summary of your entire lab report. It is usually about 250 words long and contains all of the essential points of the research report such as the introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion. A concise abstract helps the reader quickly understand the purpose, results and significance of your research without having to read the entire report. This ends up being quite useful in the scientific community. Suppose someone is conducting a library research, they can assess whether any of the lab reports will be relevant to the topic they are interested in with the help of the abstract. Although the abstract is placed at the beginning of the lab report, it should be written after you have finished writing the lab report. This helps to accurately reflect your results and findings in the abstract.
- An abstract should begin with a brief statement introducing the purpose of your research; it should contain the research problem or the hypothesis of the lab report.
- It should be followed by a short description of your procedure or methodology, such as the materials and equipment employed while conducting the experiment or research.
- For the results portion of the abstract, you should state your overall findings in a neat manner, quantitative and qualitatively. Any important measure, such as standard deviation or correlation should be mentioned clearly.
- Just as in your lab report, the results should be followed by a discussion of the results. In the abstract, this portion should only contain the important points of the discussion which are relevant to the research problem or hypothesis.
- The conclusion should briefly state what you have learned from conducting the experiment or research.
- Ensure that you use the correct tense for every portion of the abstract. The tense for each portion remains the same as the ones used while writing the report.
Master writing your introduction
The introduction should state the problem or purpose of the research and also provide some background information related to it. It should provide the reader with a brief review of previous literature which is relevant to the current research problem. An effective introduction should be able to accomplish the following tasks:
- It should efficiently describe your research problem and be able to state the research question. This means that firstly, you need to analyze the given research problem and then divide it into two categories: the knowns and the unknowns. As the name suggests, the known are what you already know about the problem (perhaps based on earlier research) and the unknowns are what you aim to find out with the help of the current work. Secondly, you need to organize the unknowns in the form of a question or in the form of statement (such as a hypothesis or a null hypothesis) which summarises what needs to be found out with the help of the present work.
- It should successfully establish the scientific question of the lab. It should be able to state what scientific concept you will be able to learn by conducting the work. Additionally, it should also give background information and references related to what you already know about the scientific concept.
- It should state the hypothesis as well as provide a logical reasoning for it. You should use references of previous researchers or experiments that are similar to your research problem in order to support your hypothesis. Ensure that you document the references that you are employing in the appropriate manner.
It is important to keep in mind that when stating current theories you should use the present tense, but in other cases, you may use the past or present perfect tense wherever you may deem fit.
Tidy-up your Materials and Methods
The past tense is employed when writing this portion of the lab report. It describes the procedure of the experiment, that is, how you conducted the work and what materials were employed. In order to describe what you did, you may use the first person narrative or passive voice, however, the latter is usually preferred. This section should be detailed enough so that others may be able to reciprocate your work if they so wish. If you feel that the method that was used by you is too complicated, try to break it into subparts. Or if you feel that it is not detailed enough, try to go back to the notes you took while conducting the work and add more information.
Improve how you write your results
For this section, past tense is employed to state your findings of the research. In this section, you do not interpret or draw any conclusions based on your findings, but simply state them in an organized manner.
This section is usually short, with both numbers and short sentences describing the results. Your findings should also be supplemented by graphs, figures or tables (you may use all or whichever is appropriate) to help the reader better understand your findings. In this section, you may also state whether something unexpected occurred or if something went wrong. Calculations for these results are usually recorded in a separate section or in the appendix.
A well-organized result section provides the framework for the following section: discussion.
Improve the discussions
The discussion portions helps in describing the relationship and patterns that emerged during the experiment. An effective discussion should open with a statement affirming the hypothesis. This statement should be supported by appropriate evidence and data from your findings. You should state the evidence in such a way that the reader is able to clearly see how it supports the hypothesis, and how it has to lead you to your judgment. Make sure that you provide sufficient research evidence as well as reasoning in order to support your statement. The reader may not have understood how you have reached your judgment to ensure that you have provided sufficient details to support how you came to your judgment.
In this section, you either accept or reject your hypothesis. You may reject the hypothesis only if you are able to provide sufficient evidence supporting that your hypothesis is untrue. Here, you should provide enough evidence to explain why your research didn’t provide the results that you had expected. Make sure that you are able to effectively link your results to solve the research problem since that is the main of your work. In this portion, you should effectively organize your material so that any questions pertaining to the lab may be answered clearly. If you are able to do so efficiently, it shows the reader that you have been able to understand the work.
Make your conclusion better
This section is generally written in the past tense and is kept short and concise. Here, you restate the main purpose of your work, the results obtained, and how your work is relevant to the scientific community. This portion is required to ensure that the reader has no doubt about what has been learned through the work. If required provide additional detail regarding your work, but ensure that it is short and concise.
Organise your references
A list of references is provided at the end of the work separately. Every source that has been used by you to write your lab manual should be included in this section. This includes any lab manuals, technical documents, textbooks or any other texts. Make sure that it is stated in the correct format since different papers require different formats in which citations need to be written.
Other general tips
Now that you have ensured that all other portions of your report are as concise and organized as they can be, it is important to review your work once more. Check that you have not made any grammatical errors, and have used scientific terms properly. Review your work to make sure that it is clear and to the point. You should also recheck any calculations, figures and graphs used in your lab report. Make sure that you have included sufficient details, and if required ask your teacher to review it before you turn it in. The more effort and time you spend on writing your report, especially your discussion, the better your report will turn out to be.
