If you're like most students, by the time you graduated high school you had written dozens of essays, short stories, and even poems. But many students have never been asked to perform technical writing. This is a different style of writing that is used very often in the sciences, engineering, and other technical fields. Although technical writing is similar to other types of writing you have done, there are some very important differences, which you will learn about as you work through the following pages.
Technical writing is used to generate many different kinds of written products, such as textbooks, magazine articles, and computer manuals. The goal of this module is to acquaint you with one specific type of technical writing: the lab report. Most science courses require you to write at least one lab report during the semester. By the end of this module, you will have a more thorough understanding of the style of writing required by lab reports, the parts of a typical lab report, how to use graphs and tables to illustrate your data, and how to properly cite the sources you used in your research.
The main reason for writing a lab report or scientific paper is to communicate the results of a scientific study to the public (or your teacher). Keeping this purpose in mind, there are some important things you want to remember when writing your lab report.
Use concise language that clearly communicates what you are trying to say. Scientists like to get straight to the facts without any distractions, so there is no need for the kind of "flowery" language you might use in a short story, poem, or personal essay. The sentences should provide enough detail so the reader knows what happened, but not so much detail that it gets overwhelming.
Example:
Which of the following examples do you think best illustrates the concise language you should use in a lab report?
a. The plants exposed to full sunlight showed amazing amounts of growth after a couple weeks.
b. The entire lab group laughed when the water spilled out of the test tube.
c. The plants exposed to full sunlight grew an average of 3 cm in 14 days, while the plants left indoors grew only 0.5 cm on average.
d. The plants grew.
Another important point about lab reports is that they should usually be written in third person, past tense. This means you should not use personal pronouns like "I" or "we." And all the procedures you used in your study should be written about as if they happened in the past. It can be a little awkward writing in the "passive voice" like this because most English classes teach that this style of writing is incorrect. But in science, we try to use language that is impersonal and objective. Some scientists are not as concerned about this rule as they used to be, but your instructor may require your lab reports to be written this way.