Yihui Wang1

Yihui Wang

Professor Masha Fedorova

Writing 2

05/16/2019

Writing in Chemistry Lab (Final Draft)

As a physics-major student, chemistry is one of my required courses, and I have to take the

lab to understand the theories better. At first, I resisted taking this lab course because I felt so

busy with my schedule. However, after learning more about this Chem Lab, I found that there

was an attractive and unique writing project, undergraduate chemistry lab report, which

brought me enormous challenges. To have an excellent performance in the course, I considered

about the steps to make a successful undergraduate Chem Lab Report at UCSB around our

Chemistry 1B Lab discourse community in spring 2019. From the research, I realized that four

steps would help us make a complete and effective chemistry lab report: cover page,

introductory paragraph, body (includes the theory and methodology section), and conclusion.

At first, the Chemistry 1B Lab course is a discourse community because it follows all of the

criteria mentioned by John Swales in the article “The Concept of Discourse Community.”

(Swales, 24-27) For all of the natural science students who are asked to take this chemistry lab

class, we have a common goal, which is working together to understand further in chemistry

studying (criteria 1,4). In this course, to have better communication, we set Gauchospace,

which is an online forum to all of the UCSB students, as our genre, and we can use this online

forum to give feedback to every classmate about their performance during experimenting

(criteria 2 and 3). If someone wants to join this Chem 1B Lab class, he needs to have a score

with a minimum grade of a “C” in Chem 1A Lab (criteria 6). Because most of the students in

this class are good at basic proper nouns in chemistry, we design our unique language to help
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us save the time for making stoichiometry, which is calculation in chemistry. (criteria 5)

Because this academic course fulfills all of the requirements, I believe this course can be

considered as a discourse community.

In this discourse community, the main writing project is the Undergraduate Chemistry Lab

Report. At the beginning of the course, I did not recognize the importance of this lab report

project, until my TA, Xikun Liu, mentioned that. Once I, fortunately, had a chance to interview

with him, he pointed out the reason for the lab report’s importance. He said, “This lab report is

the primary way for us to check your understanding of the assigned experiment. If you want to

blend into this undergraduate chem lab discourse community, you have to make great work

every time. As a result, this lab report-making process is essential.” (Personal Communication,

May 8, 2019) Through the interview, I figured out that this lab report was the essence of this

chemistry lab course. In this Chem 1B Lab course, we need to conduct and reflect on these

experiments, which are our lab reports. As a result, in this community, we communicate about

our process of making lab reports and exchange the experience of creating useful reports.

However, how do we make an excellent chem lab report? To figure out this question, I went

to find some resources to show me what the adequate lab report was. The article “How to Write

a General Chemistry Lab Report” tells us that “First, you will construct the title page. On the

upper right-hand side of the page, you will want to include your name, your class information,

the date of submission, and your team members names. Each one of these points should be on

a separate line.” (Karadragunas, 3) This step introduces who handles this experiment, and

makes an explicit credit to the reader. In addition, according to Karadragunas, we will put lots

of titles: Class Title, Title of Experiment, and Title of Each Part in the experiment in the middle

of our cover page. (Karadragunas, 3) This is another necessary procedure because your readers

can directly determine whether they need to read the whole article through the title of the thesis

of the experiment. These two components form the cover page of a chemistry lab report.
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After finishing the cover page, we are going to make a short abstract, or introduction, to the

experiment. This introduction benefits your readers to understand further about the goals for

the research you made. According to “Lab Report Writing Guidelines,” there is a small tip that

we need to be careful with: “When writing an abstract for a lab report, you should keep it short

and to the point - just a few sentences (3-6) matching the above structure are enough. As a

result, your target audience will immediately understand the primary objective of your

experiment.” (Best Custom Writing) This tip is in agreement with the suggestion I got from the

interview with my TA. He pointed out that “you have to make your words as effective as you

can.” (Personal Communication, May 8, 2019) Both of the descriptions demonstrate that it is

better to reduce all of the useless adjectives; only keep all of the reports to the experiment. For

example, in the device-introduction part, I would only point out the names and scales of the

devices I would use in the experiment. However, no interpretations of the functions of those

devices I would put in this part, because that might be too wordy. This effective language style

is much easier for your readers, classmates, and professors, as well as TAs, to check and

compare the understanding of the knowledge learned from the experiment.

The next part of a chemistry lab report is the body called “Procedure,” which is the most

significant step of making an outstanding chemistry lab report. In this part, we state all the

processes in our experiments categorically. According to the introduction from “Lab Report

Writing Guidelines,” procedure is separated into two parts; one is the theory section, and

another one is the methodology section (Best Custom Writing). In the first part, we explicitly

explain the theory to offer a technical background to the experiment. Moreover, the result we

gained from our research should obey the theory we introduce here. Even though the writing

style should be as effective as we can for writing a chem lab report, we still need to write these

theories in an exquisite way for further understanding. Then, in the methodology part, we are

going to describe the equipment we used in the experiment, and carefully list every step in the
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experiment. It is better for us to draw pictures of our experimental devices to help readers

understand more clearly. In addition, the article “Five Steps to Writing Successful Science Lab

Reports” points out that “Write the procedure section in the first person, past tense.” (Alpha

Omega Academy) The reason is that we did this experiment before we write the lab report, so

the lab report should be presented by the first-person point of view in the past tense. This tip

can bring a sense of empathy to your readers like they were experimenting.

Finally, the last step for making an excellent chemistry lab report is the conclusion, which

includes results and lots of data analysis of your experiment. We use the stoichiometry to find

the outcome of our experiment. Usually, the experimental result has a little percent error

compared with the ideal theoretical result; thus, we need to determine the reasons for the

appearance of this mistake. Besides the data recorded in the experiment, “Any other significant

concepts obtained from the completion of the lab should be included in the conclusion”

(Karadraguns, 13). This shows that in the chemistry lab report, we could not only write down

all the predesigned steps of the experiment, but also all of the other situations beyond our

imagination; that means, everything that happens in the experiment should be recorded.

To sum up, because of the suggestion from my TA and the experience offered by those

resources, now I have understood the exact steps to make the undergraduate chemistry lab

report perfectly. I need to follow the four-part structure, which is cover page-introduction-

body-conclusion format. Moreover, I will obey all of the small tips provided by the articles,

like using the first person and past tense in the body part and draw a picture to show how the

device of the experiment works. Next time making this undergraduate chemistry lab report, I

would do much more adequate work and try to achieve all of the requirements of the lab report.
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Work Cited

Swales, John. “The Concept of Discourse Community.” The University of Michigan, Ann

Abor.

Karadragunas. “How to Write a General Chemistry Lab Report.” Instructables, Instructables,

17 Oct. 2017, www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Write-a-General-Chemistry-Lab-Report/.

“Lab Report Writing Guidelines.” Professional Custom Writing Service,

www.bestcustomwriting.com/blog/how-to-write-a-lab-report.

“Five Steps to Writing Successful Science Lab Reports.” Alpha Omega Academy, 13 Aug.

2009, www.aoacademy.com/five-steps-to-writing-successful-science-lab-reports/.

Xikun, Liu. Personal Interview. 08 May 2019.