Tareas Todo

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HOW TO WRITE A LAB REPORT
“… it was in plain, unaffected English, such as Mr. Knightly used even to the woman he was in love with…” --- Emma 8.1 INTRODUCTION Science is fundamentally a communal process, in which individual scientists develop ideas and then seek through the medium of scientific journal articles to convince the scientific community of their validity. Learning how to communicateyour ideas effectively is therefore a crucial skill for a working scientist (and is useful in many other callings as well). Consequently, you need know how to describe the science that you do in a way that convinces the reader that your work is interesting and should be taken seriously. You may feel that comparing your lab work and the resulting report to “real” science that appears in journalsis a bit pretentious, since we’re probably not going to have you do much cutting-edge physics in an introductory laboratory. The purpose of the lab reports, though, is not so much to see if you did bold, original work as it is to give you practice in writing scientific reports, so that you'll be able to do it well when you do do bold original work. Most articles in scientific journals (physicsjournals, at least) follow at least approximately a standard format, which looks something like this: ABSTRACT I. INTRODUCTION A. Motivation B. Summary of the experiment II. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND III. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN AND PROCEDURE A. Description of the apparatus B. Description of the experimental procedure IV. ANALYSIS A. Method of analysis B. Presentation of results C. Discussion of results D.(Optional) Suggestions for future improvements V. CONCLUSIONS A. Summary of the results B. Pertinence of the results to the questions raised in the introduction This format has evolved to answer the general questions a potential reader will ask: What did you do? Why did you do it? How did you do it? What happened? (Procedure) (Introduction, Theoretical background) (Procedure, Analysis) (Analysis,Conclusions)

The format also provides some shortcuts for busy (or lazy) people. Most scientific prose tends to be fairly dense, and readers like to find out in a hurry if a paper is actually of interest or

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importance to them. The abstract section provides a concise summary of the article and its most important results, so the reader only has to read afew sentences to determine if the entire article is relevant. The introduction and conclusions contain a little more information; usually the reader goes to the introduction for more information about the motivation and the method of the experiment, and the conclusion for more detail on the results summarized in the abstract. Each of these report sections is discussed in a separate section of thischapter. You will probably find it helpful to read over the entire chapter the first time you are asked to write a lab-report section (to get some sense of how the pieces of a lab report fit together). At the end of the semester, when you will write a full report, you should go back and read the entire chapter again. 8.2 THE SHORT SECTIONS: The Abstract, Introduction, and Conclusions

Mostpublished scientific papers are not read in their entirety by everyone who looks at them. It's not that they are poorly written (although some certainly are), and it’s not that scientists don't care; there are just so many hours in a day. The short sections of a technical paper -- the abstract, introduction, and conclusions sections -- identify the important results of your work, and persuade a readerthat really reading the paper is worth the time. Typically a reader will look first at the abstract, to find out what the paper is about. If the abstract looks promising, the reader will look at the conclusions. If they look interesting (and especially if they're unexpected) the reader will then check the introduction to see if the experimental method looks good. If the introduction suggests that...