Formal Labs

The purpose of writing a formal lab report is to present your findings in a similar fashion that is done for professional science journals. While not all of the professional components are required, the goal is to have a clean, clear, concise presentation of the experiment, results, and conclusions.

As a professional paper, it should show that the author and researcher has explored the range of possibilities of the results, and not just assume that the desired outcome is what occurred. This means there should be a robust analysis of errors, and alternative explanations.

Below are examples of different sections and the proper writing style.

Formal labs should be written in 3rd person, past tense, with passive voice. This is not a common style of writing, and takes some practice to do correctly. The Sample safety guidelines below shows the full range of correct and incorrect person, voice, and tense.

For those people that are having difficulty getting an equation editor to work for them, the following website worked well for me.

http://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php

I was able to make the following equation with the website above.

It's pretty!