Ani, Araf                                                                                                                              10/15/22

Writing for Engineers                                                                               Elements for Lab Reports

The 8 elements of a Lab Report:

1. Title

The title of a lab report should be there to grab the reader’s attention. The purpose is to basically give a very general overview of what your lab report is about. The title primes the reader and gives then expectations for what they will learn about.

• Abstract

The abstract will be throughout the whole report. It will summarize sections it is placed with. It should be about 1 sentence long and it will tell the reader if they are reading the right part of the report for what information they are looking for.

• Introduction

The introduction is where the report would establish what it is about. It will lay out generally the methods use in the experiment and what to expect from the report. The introduction should include topics which the reader should have read or know about, basically a idea of the previous knowledge required from the readers.   

• Material and Methods

The main reason for this section is to show to the readers how the experiment is done. This section is the convince the reader that the experiment is done correctly and to also show how to recreate the experiment.

• Results

The results section of the lab report will be where all the data of the experiments will be congregated. This is where the author would use the data to persuade that reader that their hypothesis was correct or that their previous statements were correct.

• Discussion

The discussion section is where the author can more inadeptly discuss their findings. The author could talk about what might have gone wrong and what to look for when doing the experiment. This section can also be called the analysis section.

• Conclusion

Summarize the main points of the lab report and also the purpose of the lab report. It shouldn’t be too long since it is only a summary.

• Acknowledgements

If the author received help from fellow colleges or used data/methods from another study, this is the section to give the credit and thanks to the outside sources.