Producing a professional lab report

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Science, Engineering and Technology, Rochester, New York, June 14-17 2004. FUELCELL20044-2455 p79-85.
3 Producing a professional lab report – general rules
In addition to being structured in a logical manner with appropriate, detailed and concise content as mentioned in section 2, there are a number of conventions that are adopted for engineering and other laboratory reports. It is important that the wording in reports is clear, precise and accurate, using well written English without grammar or spelling errors. In addition, the following points should be considered.
3.1 Tense The majority of the laboratory reports should be written in the past tense, i.e. describing things that have already happened. For .ample, sentences such as “During the experiment it was noted that buckling occurred at loadings above 15 kN” or “It was found that the efficiency could be increased 17% using the new material” are appropriate. There are, however, circumstances when other tenses are appropriate. The present or future tense can be used, for example, in the introduction or specifically in the abstract to describe what the reader will reach further in the document. For example, an abstract may include text such as “This paper presents the development of a novel technique for cooling switched reluctance electrical machine windings”. The present tense should be used for describing perpetual, static information. For example, the statement “The current demand for domestic electrical energy varies dramatically and randomly throughout day”, is still true after the experiment has been conducted. These situation are the exception and in the majority of the cases, when describing the work that was done, the past tense should be used.
3.2 Third person Third person should always be used in lab reports. This involves avoiding the use of subjective personal pronouns (I, you, he, she, them, us, we). Sentences can easily be re-arranged to use with third person with a little effort. For example “We set the test rig up with 75 millilitres of hydrochloric acid”, which uses the fist person plural, can be changed to “The test rig was set up with 75 millilitres of hydrochloric acid”, which uses the third person. Notice the use of the past tense.
3.3 Layout and labelling Unless directed to do an by an institutional code for document preparation, each page should be consecutively numbered. This is also true for sections and subsections. Provided this document reaches the printer in its intended format, it should provided an .ample of section and page numbering. For large reports, the document may be divided into chapters, and pages before the introduction may be number using Roman numerals (i, ii, iii, iv … ) and the first page of the introduction starting again using Arabic numbers (1, 2, 3 … ). All fig-ures and tables should be numbered consecutively and labelled. If there are a large number of figures and tables it may be appropriate to provide a list of them at the beginning or end of the document and adopt a labelling convention that incorporates the section number. For example, if a figure is the first to appear in section 5 it may be labelled figure 5.1. Figures should always be numbered, so that they can be referred to from the text using their figure number. For example, the diagram I have included to demonstrate figures should appear and be labelled in lab reports shown in figure 1.
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