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Lab Report Writing

Writing reports is an important part of working in a lab and forms a large part of your assessment. Here, you will find advice on how to write your own. Report writing can be a difficult but rewarding process, which is why you will get a lot of practice doing it before graduating! You will write two reports (one formative and one summative) in the Epiphany term of your first year, often about short experiments involving fundamental laws and phenomena, to get familiar with the process. In the second and third year, you will write reports about more open-ended projects that take much longer to complete (weeks, as opposed to hours). At Level 4, your final project report will be based on six months of work!

There are prizes at each level for students who have presented exceptional graphs in their reports, see the Graphical Excellence page for more details.

Current students can find the most updated guidance and departmental guidelines on SharePoint.

How to write your report

Please follow the below links for guidance

Report Structure

All scientific reports are broken down into 8 sections - find out more here.
Fingers tapping on a keyboard

Equations, Symbols and Units

Find out what the rules are for using equations and the correct units and symbols.
Equations Symbols and Units

Written Style

You should aim for simplicity, concision and clarity. Be precise and choose your words carefully. Find out more key pointers here.
A hand holds a pen that is writing a report on lined paper

Figures, Graphs and Tables

Check out the do's and don'ts for graphs
Figures, graphs and tables

Referencing

Anything that you had to look up, or that isn't your original work should be referenced. Find out more about how to do that here.
Books on a shelf