Statics and Mechanics of Materials Lecture Notes

Help for Writing up Your Laboratory Reports

Date: 25 September 2013

Help for Writing Up Your Laboratory Reports

Introduction
There is an excellent guide online, which you should read before you come to the laboratory
sessions:

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/ei/internal/forstudents/engineeringdesign/studyguides/labwriting

In addition to this, I have listed the most common mistakes that students tend to do when writing up
their work. It is important that you read these before your laboratory session, because each year,
the same mistakes tend to be repeated. My guarantee to you is, that if you read this report, I cannot
see any way that you score less than 50% on your lab reports. No matter which subject your lab is in.

Key to Excellent Reports

Imagine that someone else outside our class is reading your work. They know about mechanical
engineering and stress tests, but they don’t know exactly what you have done. A good report must
not be ambiguous in any way to that person. The reader should feel that everything is crystal clear
with regards to what you have done, tested, the results you have displayed, and the written parts of
your report. If you think that at any point the reader might misinterpret something you have written
or displayed, then you need to make it more clear. On top of it, you need to do all this in the least
amount of words possible. This is almost an art, and it only gets better with practice.

The questions I ask myself continuously when writing is: “Can this be misinterpreted in any way?”
and “If I remove this sentence or word, will the meaning change?” If the meaning does not change, I
remove that sentence or word as it is redundant and it will make your reader lose focus.

Graphs
Units Missing in the Graphs:

You may have just labelled the Y-axis as “Stress”, rather than “Stress, MPa”. I know what the
units are, but for anyone else reading your work, the lack of units makes it impossible to
deduce anything useful out of your graph because you don’t know if the stress in MPa, GPa,
Pa or some other unit.

Title Missing or Unclear

If you just labelled your graph as “graph 1” you can’t tell for which sample the results are
for. This again, would render all your hard work useless.

Legend Missing

If you have more than one set of data in one graph, then you need to use different markers,
colours, or a legend to make sure that each set of data is distinguishable.
Statics and Mechanics of Materials Lecture Notes
Help for Writing up Your Laboratory Reports
Date: 25 September 2013

X or Y-Axis Size and Divisions are not Clear

This point comes down to what part of your acquired data is meaningful. In the first
laboratory experiment, for example, only the elastic range offers us something useful (you
will understand what I mean when you read the actual lab script). If you included the whole
dataset (elastic + plastic range), chances are that you had a hard time drawing your
gradients to calculate the Young’s modulus. With a more clever use of the x-axis space, you
can draw a more precise gradient line, and thus get a better result for your Elastic Modulus.
Same applies in any other graph you plot. Always think what kind of axis division gets you
the clearest most meaningful graph. Sometimes this also comes down to choosing whether
you should have a linear graph, or a logarithmic graph.

Table of Calculated Results, Original Table of Hand-recorded Results Missing

This is more of a “legal point” than anything else. It is not always possible to include fully hand-
recorded data (if your data set includes millions of points), but if you don’t have any hand-recorded
data or observations, other scientists might say you have adjusted the data electronically after the
experiment to suit your hypothesis. The hand-recorded data or observations serve as proof that you
didn’t adjust your data later on. This can be a bit messy, and it should be written with a pen rather
than something that can be easily erased.

Mistake in Calculations
This happens always and we cannot really avoid doing mistakes. In this particular lab, the most likely
mistake you would have done is to do a calculation where the units don’t match up. In other words,
you have your meters and millimetres mixed up in one equation. There are two common techniques
to avoid this. First is a question: “Do your results seem to make sense?” If you don’t know how to
answer that, you can always look up other experiments that have been done, and compare your
results with “literature” values.

The Column Headings of the Table do not Include Units or the Units are Included, but
within the Results Themselves. Results include too many Significant Figures

Correct:

Sample Ultimate Tensile Strength (MPa)

Brass 114

Incorrect:

Sample Ultimate Tensile Strength

Brass 114.175495 MPa

In addition of including the units within the results themselves, which makes the second table harder
to read, this example has way too many significant figures in it. I know high-school maths may have
taught you to calculate precise answers but there is a practical limit to how many significant figures
Statics and Mechanics of Materials Lecture Notes
Help for Writing up Your Laboratory Reports
Date: 25 September 2013

are meaningful. Best way to think of this is to consider your rough measurement accuracy,
dependant on your particular testing system. In this case, the force readings are within 0.1kN, as
seen on the force displays. You might get a result with lots of significant figures because you are
dividing and multiplying different quantities, but in the end your force readings are not going to be
any more accurate than 0.1kN. So to include a result for ultimate tensile strength with 1 Pascal
precision is to say you measured the force with an accuracy of 1 Newton or better. This is clearly not
the case. A more reasonable amount of significant figures might be up to 0.01 kN as anything
beyond this, would not make the slightest difference to your end result. This is a subtle but an
extremely important point. If you include too many significant figures, you imply that you don’t
really understand what you have measured, and how reliable your results are. Even many final year
students make this mistake, so make sure you always consider your significant digits.

General Labelling and Numbering

You should always number each table, figure, and image, so that when you need to refer to them in
your written parts of the report, you can say things like “referring to table 2 of calculated results”….If
there is no numbering, it makes it harder to point to a particular table and you will also have to write
lengthier descriptions to make sure the reader is looking at the table you want them to look at.

Written Parts of the Report (Summary, Conclusion, Discussion)

Most common mistake is not knowing what each of these written sections actually require you to
write about. Hence I gave you that assignment in your first worksheet, and I pointed you to a link to
read what “discussion”, “conclusion”, and “summary” mean in the scientific context. It is very easy
to just make up your own idea of what should be included in these sections, but actually these parts
have very detailed meanings in the scientific community. Below I have pointed out some most
common assumptions about each of these sections. Please read the content in the link that I have
provided at the beginning of this document, as well as reading my added comments below.

Discussion
A lot of students think that discussion refers to the chatty bit of your report, and that you have the
license to go on and on about things that have little relevance to what you have actually done. This is
not the case. The discussion must be related the objectives of the experiment, and anything that
doesn’t relate strictly to the objectives, should not be included. The discussion should be short and
to the point, but it has to show that you have thought and analysed your work carefully. In other
words, you should discuss about the significance of your results and what they really mean. If the
objective asks about uncertainties, then you would also include something about that in this section.

Another common mistake I see in discussions is the tendency to describe what you have done in the
lab. A lot of students like to repeat the lab “procedure” in this section, but this is not related to the
discussion in any way. I guess this happens because usually the procedure has already been written
for you, so you might feel there is a need to repeat it. This is the case especially with first year
reports. The best rule to remember is that you should not repeat anything that I have already
written in the theory section or the procedure section of the lab report. Although these parts are not
written by you, they are still a part of your report.
Statics and Mechanics of Materials Lecture Notes
Help for Writing up Your Laboratory Reports
Date: 25 September 2013

Conclusion
The conclusion also is strictly related to the objective. You should state how far the objective of the
experiment has been achieved, and you should sum up the main findings from the results and
discussions here.

The key with conclusions is to NOT include any new material. You are merely providing a very
concise and brief description of the final outcome of your work.

Also, any conclusion that starts with “In conclusion”, or includes the words “this experiment was a
success” is not what I am looking for. You don’t need to say “in conclusion”, because the title says it.
Also, if you felt the experiment went well, then you can say that the “objective of the experiment
was reached, and the values for the Elastic Modulus’ were….” Sounds better this way. We are not
trying to conclude what your personal feelings were after you finished the lab here.

Summary
This is what it says in the guide for lab report writing online:

“The summary is a report in miniature, normally of not more than 200 words. It will state the main
objectives of the work, and the principal results and conclusions; it will omit all inessential detail. A
summary should not merely describe what the report is about; it should also give some information
about the results. Where appropriate, it may include quantitative results.”

To this, I would add that quantitative results should be included when the objective of the lab report
is along the lines of “find the values of quantities a, b, and c”.

The best advice I can give you is to look at the objective of the lab, and concentrate on writing about
the objective in your summary, nothing less, nothing more. Inessential detail is what I see most often
in summaries. Most often students write about the details of how they did the tests. We applied a
load with a lever slowly…recorded the data…tightened the extensometer screws…removed the
extensometer carefully….This is the kind of detail that anyone can figure out while they are doing
the test themselves, and it is therefore not needed in the summary. All you need is a brief statement
about what you tested and how the test method works in principle.

Another way of thinking about the summary is to write it in a way that if someone reads it and thinks
about it hard enough, they should be able to repeat your tests without looking at other parts of the
report. However, the key is to write as little as possible, but in a way that gives a complete picture
of what your experiment and results are all about.

In the real world, a summary is what your manager would read in a company to decide how much
time and money they should allocate to your proposal or a project. They do not have time to read
your whole report, no matter how beautifully written and presented it is. Based on the summary,
they will then read further, if interested. If you write a rubbish summary, you can be sure that your
proposal ends in the paper shredder.