It would be really good if engineering would have been only about practical stuff, like invention, experiments and breakthrough moments. Fortunately or unfortunately, you have to do lots of paperwork during your education to become an engineer and continue with your career, one of the basics of that paperwork is writing engineering lab reports. No matter the field of your study, if you want to become an engineer, you have to learn how to write good lab reports and you need to do it as fast and as efficiently as you can. So, let’s get straight to business.
Lab report reflects what you have done during the experiment and what you have learned doing it. Don’t read too much into it, the report is exactly what you think it is — brief and easy to understand, well-structured paper on some details around your experiment. You need to make people who read your lab report understand:
- What you wanted to do and what you wanted to achieve, check, by doing it;
- How you did it;
- What you achieved;
- What the significance of your achievement is.
Here, you won’t find some abstract tips and explanations on how important it is to write a lab report and how professors like reports to be clear and simple. We will look through every part of the lab report, so you can write it just while reading this article abstract after abstract.
- No need to be extra creative here. Just write what was happening. “Measurement of the…” If after finishing your lab report you have some extra time to think about better, more catchy title — do it, but for now just write it as clear and simple as you can.
- State in one, maximum (!) two sentences what your goal is. If you need more than two sentences to state the aim of your engineering lab report, something is truly wrong with the aim.
- Introduction / Background. Several sentences on how you have come to the idea of doing this experiment, why it is important, which similar experiments were held before, etc. Make sure to write the way your readers understand the importance of what you are trying to do here. Don’t be too dry, though, of course, remember that it is a scientific paper.
- Describe the methodology used in the experiment. You can also add several sentences on why you’ve chosen these methods exactly for your laboratory work and what are the limitations of those methods.
- Results and Discussion. Normally, the discussion includes hypothesis, and the results are revealed in more details here. Still, keep it brief, it is not a research paper.
- Conclusions. Unlike in research papers and essays, in conclusion of a lab report you can go back in time and talk not about the final result, but also add some information about equipment and the process.
- References. Don’t forget to use APA, MLA or any other required guide when writing this section. In-text citations and bibliography entries are not easy to craft when it comes to writing a lab report, all those pictures and graphs, so be extra attentive.
- Appendices. Here, you add all those graphs and tables, which you describe above. Not every lab report have appendices, so if you have nothing to add, just skip this section.
You are not alone in your lab report writing struggle, and not every great engineer will ever become a good writer, so if you need some extra help, you can always pay someone at WriteMyPaperHub to have your lab report written for you. All you need is to share information about your experiment and they will help you out.
