creation of an abstract

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labReports.pdf
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• The date • The location • The institution
• Any other pertinent information. For example, if the report is produced as part of a University teaching course, the module number, the name of the course or your student number.
2.2 An abstract
The creation of an abstract (sometimes referred to as a summary or executive summary) is a difficult task and one that is often performed badly. Intended as a means for readers of the document to decide if the contents is relevant to them or is what they are expecting from the title, it is a summery of the entire document given in an extremely concise format. The abstract must include the background of the subject, the reason for conducting the experiment or research, the aims you wish to achieve, the method and procedure adopted to perform the work, any relevant phenomena that occurred, the results obtained and their anal-ysis, the interpretation of the results and their significance. All of this should be summarized in around 100-200 words (the abstract for my thesis was 332 words) and the art of writing a summary is principally deciding what information to include that the most concise method of its presentation. As the abstract is intended to be the first part of the report that will be read after the title, it is placed at the beginning of the document, before any pre-amble such as contents or acknowledgements page.
2.3 Pre-amble Should the document or circumstances justify it, a contents page, to give a guide to the forth-coming sections and subsections and an acknowledgements page, to thank any contributors, supervisors or technicians …etc. The pre-amble may include a list of figures and However, if the lab report has a large number of symbols it can be more convenient to place these all in a list called the nomenclature. If necessary, enure that all subscripts and superscripts are fully defined. The nomenclature can be placed at the beginning or end of a lab report, depending on which is more logical or which local convention dictates. The body of the report/or tables.
2.4 Nomenclature If the lab report contains a number of equations and formulae, the symbols used to denote physical properties (such as p for density, W for work …etc) should be defined once on the first occasion that they are used. For example, Newton’s second law of motion dictates that the force experienced by as solid body is the product of it’s mass and acceleration, as per the equation,
F=mbxa (1)
where F represents force, rn, is the body’s mass and a is the acceleration.
However, if the lab report has a large number of symbols it can be more convenient to place these all in a list called the nomenclature. If necessary, ensure that all subscripts and superscripts are fully defined. The nomenclature can be placed at the beginning or end of a lab report, depending on which is more logical or which local convention dictates.
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2.5 An introduction
The introduction provided the reader with the background to the work that is documented in the lab report. This section is should set the scene for what is to follow. There should be a broad introduction into the background of the science and contextualize the reasons the purpose of doing the work. For example, if the subject of the lab report is discussing an experiment conducted on a photovoltaic solar panel, the introduction should mention the principles of collecting solar energy from the sun and conversion of solar energy to electrical energy by photons operating on photodiod.. To place in context the purpose of this example experiment, the introduction of the lab report would include involve discussing the benefits of increasing the efficiency solar cells as reducing the manufacturing cost of solar energy and potentially reducing the carbon emissions of alternative energy production. Given that the reader may not be familiar with the specifics of the discipline that the researcher may be working in, it is necessary to give a broad description of the work that has been conducted and the science involved and attempt, where possible, to explain any