laboratory description creative writing

If you're into , , or fantasy & science fiction, I'm glad you're here. We should connect.

Click on the big red X on the top right to close this box.

• Join for Free

Creative Writing Lab: Experiment with Words

A course by karen villeda , writer and editor.

Overcome the fear of writing by learning to combine literary genres such as narratives, poetry, and essays

• Information

Ever wondered if writing could be more fun? In this online course, Mexican writer Karen Villeda shows you her creative process based on experimentation and combining literary genres. She has had more than ten books published, some of which have won awards, and was writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa.

Throughout this course, get ready to be introduced to different creative techniques for tackling the blank page and uncover some amazing ideas in the process . Delve into the world of literary genres and learn to combine them in your texts. Karen talks about key themes like work, perseverance, and planning when it comes to writing . Then wrap everything up by learning to do a critical review of your text.

What will you learn in this online course?

12 lessons & 16 downloads

• 96% positive reviews ( 55 )
• 1710 students
• 12 lessons (1h 20m)
• 16 additional resources (2 files)
• Online and at your own pace
• Available on the app
• Audio: Spanish
• Spanish , English , Portuguese , German , French , Italian , Polish , Dutch
• Level: Beginner
• Unlimited access forever

What is this course's project?

Combine elements from the narrative, poetic, and essay genres to develop a short text.

Projects by course students

By vale_nava

By aasanzzp

By lidiacoronado

Who is this online course for?

Anyone with a curious, open mind and the enthusiasm to write.

Requirements and materials

No previous knowledge or experience in writing is necessary for this course.

As for materials, all you need is paper and a pencil or pen. If you prefer, you can opt for a computer with a word processor like Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

Es una propuesta interesante. Lo recomiendo para quienes se inician en la escritura. Los materiales adicionales están muy bien elegidos.

View translation

Hide translation

brandonbainilla

AAAH! increible, encantado del curso, los recursos que se deja son muy valiosos, gracias Karen.

jmahcordeiro

Curso muito interessante para estimular a criatividade. Maravilhoso!

carolinacepeda

El curso y la profesora me estimula a escribir.

zulytaveras

Estoy comenzando el curso, y me esta gustando mucho, sobre todo la manera cómo puedo ir expresando mis sentimientos por medio de las palabras.

• More reviews

Karen Villeda A course by Karen Villeda

Despite having grown up surrounded by books, Mexican writer Karen Villeda had a lot of difficulty learning to read. Her mother patiently taught her and, before long, she was reading pirate stories by herself, and at just 19, she published her first book. Karen believes that literary genres are interchangeable and can be combined, which is why she considers her writing to be a hybrid.

She has had more than ten books published, and her book Dodo (Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro) won the Premio Nacional de Poesía Joven Elías Nandino in 2013 and is part of the Archivo de Literatura Hispánica en Audio. Karen's work has earned her more than fifteen prizes and she has also been writer-in-residence in the University of Iowa. She is currently an editor and gives classes in creative writing.

Introduction

• Presentation

The world of words and diamond mines

• Creative writing and literary genres
• Why experiment?
• Materials and materiality of writing

The Perfect Diamond!

• The narrative

Cut and polish the diamond for jewelry

• Fill your blank sheets
• Review and editing
• Where to go?

Final project

What to expect from a domestika course, learn at your own pace.

Enjoy learning from home without a set schedule and with an easy-to-follow method. You set your own pace.

Learn from the best professionals

Learn valuable methods and techniques explained by top experts in the creative sector.

Meet expert teachers

Each expert teaches what they do best, with clear guidelines, true passion, and professional insight in every lesson.

Certificates Plus

If you're a Plus member, get a custom certificate signed by your teacher for every course. Share it on your portfolio, social media, or wherever you like.

Get front-row seats

Videos of the highest quality, so you don't miss a single detail. With unlimited access, you can watch them as many times as you need to perfect your technique.

Share knowledge and ideas

Ask questions, request feedback, or offer solutions. Share your learning experience with other students in the community who are as passionate about creativity as you are.

Connect with a global creative community

The community is home to millions of people from around the world who are curious and passionate about exploring and expressing their creativity.

Watch professionally produced courses

Domestika curates its teacher roster and produces every course in-house to ensure a high-quality online learning experience.

Domestika's courses are online classes that provide you with the tools and skills you need to complete a specific project. Every step of the project combines video lessons with complementary instructional material, so you can learn by doing. Domestika's courses also allow you to share your own projects with the teacher and with other students, creating a dynamic course community.

All courses are 100% online, so once they're published, courses start and finish whenever you want. You set the pace of the class. You can go back to review what interests you most and skip what you already know, ask questions, answer questions, share your projects, and more.

The courses are divided into different units. Each one includes lessons, informational text, tasks, and practice exercises to help you carry out your project step by step, with additional complementary resources and downloads. You'll also have access to an exclusive forum where you can interact with the teacher and with other students, as well as share your work and your course project, creating a community around the course.

You can redeem the course you received by accessing the redeeming page and entering your gift code.

• Creative Writing
• Fiction Writing
• Non-Fiction Writing
• Storytelling

Courses you might be interested in

More results...

Literature and the laboratory: Where art and science meet

• Thought Leaders
• August 24, 2021

Professor Jennifer Rohn is a cell biologist, microbiologist, and head of the Centre for Urological Biology at University College London. When she isn’t in the lab undertaking vital research into urinary tract infections, she is tirelessly working to communicate the nuances of scientific research and culture through a variety of creative media. She is a novelist, a public speaker, a journalist, as well as being the founder and editor of LabLit.com – a website dedicated to the rich but understudied intersections between laboratory research and literature. Research Features spoke to Jennifer about her research, her creative writing, and the fascinating connections that bind the two.

Historically, the interrelations between science and literature have been various, complex, and widely recognised. From the remarkable scientific accuracy of Shakespeare’s plays to the voracious novel-reading of Charles Darwin, science and literature were understood as deeply connected and mutually enriching. Modern science and literature, however, are commonly framed as unbridgeable fields, representing two cultures which are seen as fundamentally unrelated, perhaps even the antitheses of one another.

Professor Jennifer Rohn’s work seeks to bridge this artificial chasm, by bringing the modern laboratory into the terrain of the novel. Through her own novels – among them, The Honest Look (2010) and Cat Zero (2018) – and her wider promotion of the genre of ‘lab lit’, she is working to ensure the broad culture of scientific research is accurately and creatively represented within literary works. Research Features were privileged to speak with her about this important interdisciplinary work.

Could you give us an introduction to the research you are undertaking in the neglected field of urinary tract infections? Our bodies are covered with bacteria, including certain places inside the body. Urinary tract infection (UTI) happens when the wrong sort of bacterium (or in some cases, fungus) travel up into the bladder, swamping out any friendly resident microbes and causing inflammation and various distressing symptoms. In some cases the bacteria keep travelling and end up in the kidney or bloodstream, which is a more serious problem that can be life-threatening. On the face of it, it doesn’t seem so serious compared with other diseases, and this is probably why relatively little research is being conducted in the area. The fact that it primarily affects women and the elderly may be another reason it’s neglected.

But this seemingly modest illness causes an enormous strain on our healthcare system and untold misery for more than 150 million people annually – especially in the one in four patients who experience repeated infections. Another serious issue is the sheer number of antibiotic prescriptions that need to be dispensed, meaning that UTI is a key driver of the global antibiotic resistance (AMR) crisis, in which slowly but surely, we are running out of drugs that still work against infections of all types. If we don’t slow the pace of AMR, we might find ourselves back in the dark ages when surgery becomes unsafe and people die from simple cuts and scrapes.

“I am deeply interested in exploring, through my writing, how scientists do their thing, and how the wider world regards us.”

In my laboratory at University College London, the team are trying to tackle UTI on several fronts. Some of us work with clinicians and their patients, sampling bacteria from recurrent infections and trying to work out what aspects of their DNA make them invasive and resistant to treatment. These patient-derived bacteria are then used in experiments within our human bladder ‘organoid’, a lab model we use to mimic the body and one which we are continually improving with the latest tissue engineering techniques. These experiments are really exciting: we try to understand, in this carefully controlled setting, precisely how the bacteria interact with the human cells at the molecular level. But bacteria have a variety of tricks to get around our defences, including hiding inside our cells, so it’s a complex problem to unravel.

Finally, we have been collaborating for many years with the engineering labs of Prof Mohan Edirisinghe at UCL and Prof Eleanor Stride at Oxford to devise novel therapies for UTI, and commercializing them through the UCL spinout company AtoCap. I’m currently the Chief Scientific Officer of the company, and we are very close to our first-in-human trial of CapFuran, a therapy designed to penetrate the bladder wall and eradicate the bacteria hiding within. It’s been a long journey of a lot of hard lab work to get where we are with CapFuran, and to see this go over the finish line will be such a thrill. Patients have been ignored and underserved for decades and they really deserve new treatments.

Alongside your medical research, you are a successful novelist and writer of short fiction. For you, how do these distinct disciplines inform and interact with one another? I won’t say that my writing would be impossible without my research experience, but the writing that I enjoy most centres squarely around science – not the facts and figures, but the culture of the profession and how it intersects with daily life. This is why I blog mostly about my life in science, and my fiction contains scientist protagonists. It’s been my observation that your average person is not familiar with the process of science – how it is done, the uncertainty, the disagreements, the grey areas. I’ve likened science to a rugby scrum, moving generally forward down the pitch, but at any given moment, it might be going backwards. You have to take the long view – today’s breathless headline about a miracle cure might not stand the test of future experimentation. Scientists work incredibly hard and sometimes passionately disagree – it’s a collective endeavour to carve ‘truth’ out of a messy series of millions of individual experiments, filtered through a lens of human bias. So I am deeply interested in exploring, through my writing, how scientists do their thing, and how the wider world regards us. Along the way, I hope that my writing sheds some light on this process for people who wouldn’t otherwise be exposed it – in an entertaining way.

As far as the other way around, fiction has become my career ‘what if’ escapism. In my second novel, The Honest Look, a new researcher in a biotech company discovers that the company’s key idea is fatally flawed. At the time, I was myself working in a Dutch biotech company whose premise seemed too good to be true. It did turn out to be true, but I really enjoyed pretending it wasn’t, and imaging the slow-motion fallout. In my third novel Cat Zero, my protagonist is a successful professor. When I started writing the novel, I’d left science and didn’t know if I’d ever make it back, so the story made me somewhat wistful in a what-if sort of way. But I found my way back to science and, nearly two decades later, I’ve just been promoted to professor, so that dream did come true in the end!

Do you have any favourite examples of writers who successfully synthesise the scientific and the literary? Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Flight Behaviour is an almost perfect example of what happens when a highly skilled literary author chooses to deal with science (which is sadly rare). The beauty of this story is that it is told from the point of view of someone who, although curious and smart, is uneducated and knows nothing about science. When scientists invade her world – field researchers studying the butterflies in a nearby woods – the character allows us, the reader, to witness the scientists and their work through the eyes of a complete outsider, and we see first-hand how each affects the other. In contrast, Weike Wong’s Chemistry is a fly-on-the-wall account of science told from the scientist’s point of view. You are in the lab with her, claustrophobically so, experiencing the hard work, the challenges and the way the profession can adversely affect mental health. Although it’s very sad, it’s also laugh-out-loud funny and brutally insightful. Science does have a dark underbelly, in the way that it tends to gobble up trainees and spit them out as a low-paid, disposable commodity. I think it’s important for people to understand what the profession is like, warts and all.

You are the editor of lablit.com. Could you tell us a little about this webzine, and what you mean by ‘Lab lit’ more generally? ‘Lab lit’, the genre, is exactly what I’ve been talking about – realistic works of fiction that feature scientists as central characters, with the scientific process as part of the plot. It’s not science fiction – which deals with speculative or future scenarios and which often does not contain any scientists. It’s actually a play on words – “laboratory literature”, of course, but also the “lit” lab – the illumination of a hidden world. I coined the term in 2005 because I’d realized how very little lab lit was actually out there, and I thought a fresh name, and pointing out the strange absence of examples, might galvanise writers into action. (At that point it had been known as ‘hard science fiction’ or ‘science-in-fiction’, but I felt those terms weren’t that helpful because they were too similar to ‘science fiction’.)

The website has been going for more than 15 years, and it’s a place where we feature new writing or poetry in the genre and highlight examples, interview authors, and even feature scientists talking about their lives. But the most popular component is “the List” – a curated and ever-growing database of works in the genre. Science is central to our lives and according to UNESCO, there are about 8 million active scientists on this planet, but there are only about 300 lab lit novels ever written. This still blows my mind. No wonder scientists and science are misunderstood; it’s an invisible profession.

You have experience in scientific communication across a broad range of media. What have been some of the thrills and challenges of engaging with audiences through a variety of channels? There are two barriers when it comes to talking about science. First is the perception, drilled into everyone at a young age, that science is “difficult”, or “scary”, or “boring”. Unfortunately, you might never get that sort of person into the room to work on. This is why I think the lab lit approach is magical: people who wouldn’t be caught dead in a science museum might happily go along to a blockbuster film with well-portrayed scientists in them, such as Gravity or The Martian or Jurassic Park . The second is that scientific information is often very complex, and it takes practice and trial-and-error to know the best way to get things across.

My most thrilling and terrifying moment was when I was roped into doing stand-up comedy in a real comedy club. I prepped for three months to do that 8-minute spot, and though people were falling over themselves laughing about life as a UTI researcher, I have never been so happy to have anything over in my life.

“Lab lit means realistic works of fiction that feature scientists as central characters, with the scientific process as part of the plot.”

You have made important public contributions throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Do you feel the pandemic has necessitated changes in public medical communication? Before COVID, I did occasionally appear on TV as a media expert, but the pandemic really blew that out of the water. At the very beginning, no one else at my university seemed to want to comment, so since I had a PhD in Virology and was keeping up with the latest science, the press office worked me hard and I found myself giving dozens of interviews a week, pounding the pavements or taking taxis between spots, sometimes not even having time to eat. It was exhausting and exhilarating all at the same time. It’s calmed a bit since but the story is still running, so I’m still giving interviews.

Media spots are particularly challenging. The presenters don’t always ask what you expect and there’s very little time, so you need to think quickly to get across the important messages, accurately and in as few seconds as possible. COVID has shown the importance of science communication – what people take away from it can literally be the difference between life and death. The preprint revolution has been a great thing – we are getting scientific results in days, not the traditional months or years, and COVID was a big driver. Maybe it’s not yet been peer reviewed, but late-breaking experimental results being shared as widely as possible has surely accelerated advances in vaccines and evidence-based public health measures.

Do you have any advice for scientific researchers who may be looking to communicate their work to new audiences? Think about starting small. Make a social media presence if you don’t already have one; it takes time to build up an audience. Twitter is particularly good for science, but tomorrow it might be something else. If writing is your thing, start a blog to practice and to use as a portfolio when you start pitching to venues. If you’re more into live stuff, take part in an initiative like ‘Soapbox Science’, ‘Fame Lab’ or ‘Pint of Science’, or find out if your university has any engagement work you can help with. If you’re good and persistent, people will start noticing.

Do you have any new writing projects in the pipeline? At the moment, it’s a struggle just to stay afloat between research, media work, teaching and spending time with my family and raising my young son. The pandemic seems to have sucked away some of my inspiration, either because of the changeless aspect of working from home, or just the backdrop of human suffering. I have started a sequel to my third novel, but I am not sure when the story will catch fire and start writing itself. My writing drive has ebbed and flowed in the past, so I’m used to these cycles and look forward to the next ‘up’ phase. In the meantime, I am putting a lot of passion and love into my garden. You should see my dahlias!

E: [email protected] W: https://jennyrohn.com/ W: LabLit.com Twitter: @JennyRohn

Creative Commons Licence

Three core surgical procedures for obstetric brachial plexus injury

W4 – a multi-dimensional root-finding method for nonlinear equations

Optimising water quality monitoring network design for bidirectional river systems

Biomechatronic modelling will change the future

Focusing attention on transcranial magnetic stimulation

ADD International

Orthognathic surgery: Tackling deceptive complexity

Most popular articles published in 2021

The Creative Writing Laboratory and its Pedagogy

• January 2013
• In book: Research Methods in Creative Writing (pp.102-132)

• Flinders University

Discover the world's research

• 25+ million members
• 160+ million publication pages
• 2.3+ billion citations

No full-text available

To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the author.

• Elizabeth Claire Alberts
• Willo Drummond
• Marcelle Freiman
• Deborah Wardle
• Carolyn Beasley
• Josie Barnard
• Spencer Jordan

• Mark McGurl
• Robert L. Solso

• Adrienne Rich

• Paul Davies

• Elliot W. Eisner

• Robert J. Sternberg
• John S. Dacey
• Kathleen H. Lennon
• David Gershom Myers

• Janene Carey
• Donna Lee Brien
• Kris Latona
• Mairead Browne
• Richard Sigesmund
• Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor
• R Sigesmund
• Ruth Neumann
• Scott Jaschik
• Francine Prose
• Dennis Strand
• Michelene Wandor
• Michel Foucault
• Gilles Deleuze
• Kate Grenville
• K Grenville
• Doug Lederman
• Recruit researchers
• Join for free
• Login Email Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google Welcome back! Please log in. Email · Hint Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google No account? Sign up

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

Writing Laboratory Reports

Stacey Corbitt

Chapter Overview

As a university student, you may be starting to recognize the significance research has to your college community. Have you noticed that professors and administrators get excited about the college receiving research grants? Are professionals at your university collaborating on and celebrating journal publications? High-stakes national-level scholarships are offered to students who show promise for professional research in their fields. All of these indicators considered together point clearly to the importance of research to most institutions of higher learning. This chapter focuses practice on the basic format of college-level primary research writing – the lab report – and helps students to learn the technical writing practice that prepares you to make contributions to the body of knowledge within your chosen field.

Why are students required to write lab reports?

You may have noticed that when your assignments in various courses require a research report, your professors are likely to insist that you rely on peer-reviewed journal articles for evidence supporting your written arguments. If magazine articles and blog posts were acceptable sources for high school papers, why are peer-reviewed professional and academic journals a big deal in college? The reasons become clear when you understand that a research journal article represents a professional-level version of the lab report . Consider the following list, adapted from the University of Toronto Mississauga Robert Gillespie Academic Skills Centre Writing Resources (n.d.), identifying ways lab reports inform academic pursuits. Lab reports

• communicate the results and importance of an experiment
• allow others to replicate the experiment and apply the scientific processes involved
• deepen students’ knowledge of course material through application and analysis
• communicate relevant theories, phenomena, and procedures
• follow the overall style of scientific writing
• demonstrate your understanding of course content

For students pursuing research as a means of developing deeper knowledge and expert skills in their field, lab reports provide the standard deliverable from scientific exploration in a form that demonstrates the students’ mastery. For professional practitioners in a field, lab reports elevate and expand to the form of research articles that may be peer-reviewed and published for study by other experts and student researchers. In either case, the larger goal of writing about research you have conducted is to expand the scholarly information available in your field of study.

What are the standard parts of a lab report?

In its “Guidelines for Writing a Lab Report,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Laboratory Fundamentals in Biological Engineering Open Courseware site (2020) posits that “the most common elements of a scientific report, in order of presentation” are: title; list of authors; abstract; introduction; materials and methods; results; discussion; and references.

Activity: take a closer look at the Introduction section

Study the annotated sample lab report layout on the following pages, which is adapted from the University of Toronto Mississauga’s Robert Gillespie Academic Skills Centre tip sheet on lab reports . Notice that the “most common elements” identified above by MIT are not all present in the sample lab report. Similarly, your assignment guidelines may require specific details that are different from this sample. Always adhere to your assignment specifications.

8 Essential Parts of a Lab Report

Read the sample introduction section on the next page and respond to the questions that follow. Note that it is not necessary for you to be familiar with the field of molecular biology to respond to the questions.

Discuss the following questions in class and respond in the space provided (or as otherwise directed by your instructor):

Review and discuss the tips 5-8  before responding to the additional questions that follow. 8 Essential Parts of a Lab Report

Instructions sometimes differentiate between the Materials and Methods section (4. in the document above on the previous page); and the Results section (5. in the sample document) of a lab report by saying that

• Materials and Methods describes what you did and what you used to do it
• Results describes what you found by doing it

The point of making such a differentiation between the two sections is that beginning technical writers sometimes combine elements of the two sections in the writing process, costing the lab report significantly in terms of clarity. To be clear, separate the “what I used and what I did” explanation distinctly from the “what I found” description.

• Finally, the Discussion or Analysis section contains the interpretation of results obtained in the laboratory or other experimental work. Similar to the clear separation you must make between Materials and Methods and Results , the discussion or analysis occupies its own major section of a lab report.

Consider the following organizational pattern, which is further discussed in the “Reporting Research Outcomes” chapter of this textbook, in terms of how the body of a lab report is organized.

Practice: examine a published lab report

Study the research article, which contains a lab report, on the following pages. The complete article was published under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-4.0) in the International Journal of Fisheries and Aquaculture (2020) . Note the various essential sections of the lab report, recognizable by the headings placed as signposts in the document. The example follows the IMRaD organizational pattern. A complete copy of the article may be downloaded here .

Activity: analyze and evaluate the sample lab report

• Review the abstract and address the following questions (adapted from “Eight Essential Parts of a Lab Report”):
• What is the purpose of the experiment?
• What materials and methods were used in the experiment?
• What are the results of the experiment, and what is their relevance?
• Review the introduction and address the following questions (adapted from “Eight Essential Parts of a Lab Report”):
• Does the introduction help the readers understand the background of the experiment and what researchers were doing through the experiment?
• What is the relevance of the experiment?
• What are the supporting theories or topics involved?
• What was the purpose of the experiment?
• How did each of the parts of the experiment help researchers achieve the purpose?
• Does the materials and methods section give enough information to readers so that they can replicate the experiment? Describe what researchers used and what they did in the experiment.
• Does the Results section present the researchers’ key findings and observations without analyzing them? Describe how well you think the lab report example uses tables, figures, and graphs to present the facts only without applying any analysis. Include relevant examples from that section and cite the article as necessary.
• The Discussion section is where the writer should analyze and interpret experimental results. Try answering these questions based on the sample lab report provided:
• What were the expected results and how do they connect to relevant theories?
• How do results compare to what was expected? Why are there differences?
• What were sources of error or limitations in the experimental design? How did such limitations affect the results?
• The Conclusion section of a lab report is where researchers can state key findings from the experiment and mention any limitations or suggestions to improve the experiment. Does the Conclusion of the lab report accomplish one or both of these tasks? Explain your answer.

Chapter conclusion

For student researchers, lab reports may be the single most valuable writing tasks they practice. The lab report highlights multiple skills areas student writers should develop to become strong writers within their fields of expertise. This chapter aims to demonstrate the essential parts of lab reports, but also – and perhaps more critically – it offers an exploration of the skills needed to develop lab reports successfully. Completion of the exercises presented should help students see the importance of adhering to standard formats; carefully presenting detail; reporting in a straightforward factual style in Materials and Methods and Results sections, while presenting clear analysis and recommendations in Discussion sections; and practicing the overall style and tone of scientific writing.

Obtain and analyze the requirements for lab reports in a particular department or field of study at your university. You may use the lab report assignment specifications for a course in which you are currently enrolled, or for one you may take in the future. If you are unsure how to obtain the instructions for a lab report, consult a teaching assistant, tutor, or lab instructor.

Write a memo that introduces and explains the requirements for a well-developed lab report in the course you selected. The audience should be first-year students at your institution. In addition to providing an introduction that identifies the purpose of your memo, address the following points, as appropriate:

• Do the labs have specific policies or guidelines students must uphold as they experiment?
• Does the lab instructor use a rubric or other guideline for grading lab reports?
• What resources, guidelines, and other advice or support can you offer the readers?

Jones, M. D., Voorhees, J. M., Huysman, N., Krebs, E., & Barnes, M. E. (2020). Use of different colours of vertically-suspended structure during the hatchery rearing of juvenile landlocked fall Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha, Walbaum). International Journal of Fisheries and Aquaculture, 12(2), 21-25 . https://doi.org/10.5897/IJFA2019.0762 . License: CC-BY-4.0

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare . https://ocw.mit.edu . License:  Creative Commons BY-NC-SA .

Robert Gillespie Academic Skills Centre (n.d.). Tip sheet: eight essential parts of a lab report. University of Toronto, Mississauga. License: BY-NC-SA-4.0. https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/asc/sites/files/asc/public/shared/pdf/tip_sheets_writing/LabReport_QR_8EssentialParts_v7.pdf .

Mindful Technical Writing Copyright © 2020 by Stacey Corbitt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless.

• The Idea of a Writing Laboratory

In this Book

• Neal Lerner
• Published by: Southern Illinois University Press
• View Citation

The Idea of a Writing Laboratory is a book about possibilities, about teaching and learning to write in ways that can transform both teachers and students.

            Author Neal Lerner explores higher education’s rich history of writing instruction in classrooms, writing centers and science laboratories. By tracing the roots of writing and science educators’ recognition that the method of the lab––hands-on student activity—is essential to learning, Lerner offers the hope that the idea of a writing laboratory will be fully realized more than a century after both fields began the experiment.    

            Beginning in the late nineteenth century, writing instructors and science teachers recognized that mass instruction was inadequate for a burgeoning, “non-traditional” student population, and that experimental or laboratory methods could prove to be more effective. Lerner traces the history of writing instruction via laboratory methods and examines its successes and failures through case studies of individual programs and larger reform initatives. Contrasting the University of Minnesota General College Writing Laboratory with the Dartmouth College Writing Clinic, for example, Lerner offers a cautionary tale of the fine line between experimenting with teaching students to write and “curing” the students of the disease of bad writing. 

            The history of writing within science education also wends its way through Lerner’s engaging work, presenting the pedagogical origins of laboratory methods to offer educators in science in addition to those in writing studies possibilities for long-sought after reform. The Idea of a Writing Laboratory compels readers and writers to “don those white coats and safety glasses and discover what works” and asserts that “teaching writing as an experiment in what is possible, as a way of offering meaning-making opportunities for students no matter the subject matter, is an endeavor worth the struggle.”

Table of Contents

• Frontmatter
• Acknowledgments
• pp. vii-viii
• Introduction: In Search of Experimentation in the Teaching of Writing
• 1. The Secret Origins of Writing Centers
• 2. Writing in the Science Laboratory: Opportunities Lost
• 3. The Writing of School Science
• 4. The Two Poles of Writing Lab History: Minnesota and Dartmouth
• 5. Project English and the Quest for Federal Funding
• pp. 107-125
• 6. Drawing to Learn Science: Lessons from Agassiz
• pp. 126-145
• 7. The Laboratory in Theory: From Mental Discipline to Situated Learning
• pp. 146-163
• 8. The Laboratory in Practice: A Study of a Biological Engineering Class
• pp. 164-193
• pp. 194-200
• pp. 201-204
• Works Cited
• pp. 205-224
• pp. 225-232

Additional Information

Project MUSE Mission

Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves.

2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218

+1 (410) 516-6989 [email protected]

©2024 Project MUSE. Produced by Johns Hopkins University Press in collaboration with The Sheridan Libraries.

Now and Always, The Trusted Content Your Research Requires

Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus

Get the Reddit app

I'm writing a novel, and i need some info on lab-people..

Hi! I hope this is ok to ask, but having zero experience about the world of laboratories, and I'm not even quite sure where else to ask these questions.

I have a main character who works in a laboratory. In her role, she's running experiments on mice, recording brain activity before and after the application of various electric stimulus (shocking them in particular ways). The research is funded by a tech company.

In the story is a male character (love interest) who is going to take her research results and get credit for her work, and then do something nefarious with the results.

Based on this brief description, here are my questions:

If research is funded by a company, does that mean the researchers are company employees? Or is it a 3rd party contract kind of thing? In your experience, are labs and the companies that fund research ever in an antagonistic relationship? (Ie., do the researchers/lab techs hate ever hate the company they're doing research for, or does that not really exist?)

Based on what I described about her, what is her job title? Is she a "researcher?"

Does the situation I described (dude taking credit for her research) make sense? Are there "competing researchers" vying for credit?

By continuing, you agree to our User Agreement and acknowledge that you understand the Privacy Policy .

Enter the 6-digit code from your authenticator app

You’ve set up two-factor authentication for this account.

Enter a 6-digit backup code

Create your username and password.

Reddit is anonymous, so your username is what you’ll go by here. Choose wisely—because once you get a name, you can’t change it.

Reset your password

Enter your email address or username and we’ll send you a link to reset your password

Check your inbox

An email with a link to reset your password was sent to the email address associated with your account

Choose a Reddit account to continue

Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Descriptive Essays

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

What is a descriptive essay?

The descriptive essay is a genre of essay that asks the student to describe something—object, person, place, experience, emotion, situation, etc. This genre encourages the student’s ability to create a written account of a particular experience. What is more, this genre allows for a great deal of artistic freedom (the goal of which is to paint an image that is vivid and moving in the mind of the reader).

One might benefit from keeping in mind this simple maxim: If the reader is unable to clearly form an impression of the thing that you are describing, try, try again!

Here are some guidelines for writing a descriptive essay.

• Take time to brainstorm

If your instructor asks you to describe your favorite food, make sure that you jot down some ideas before you begin describing it. For instance, if you choose pizza, you might start by writing down a few words: sauce, cheese, crust, pepperoni, sausage, spices, hot, melted, etc. Once you have written down some words, you can begin by compiling descriptive lists for each one.

• Use clear and concise language.

This means that words are chosen carefully, particularly for their relevancy in relation to that which you are intending to describe.

• Choose vivid language.

Why use horse when you can choose stallion ? Why not use tempestuous instead of violent ? Or why not miserly in place of cheap ? Such choices form a firmer image in the mind of the reader and often times offer nuanced meanings that serve better one’s purpose.

• Use your senses!

Remember, if you are describing something, you need to be appealing to the senses of the reader. Explain how the thing smelled, felt, sounded, tasted, or looked. Embellish the moment with senses.

• What were you thinking?!

If you can describe emotions or feelings related to your topic, you will connect with the reader on a deeper level. Many have felt crushing loss in their lives, or ecstatic joy, or mild complacency. Tap into this emotional reservoir in order to achieve your full descriptive potential.

• Leave the reader with a clear impression.

One of your goals is to evoke a strong sense of familiarity and appreciation in the reader. If your reader can walk away from the essay craving the very pizza you just described, you are on your way to writing effective descriptive essays.

• Be organized!

It is easy to fall into an incoherent rambling of emotions and senses when writing a descriptive essay. However, you must strive to present an organized and logical description if the reader is to come away from the essay with a cogent sense of what it is you are attempting to describe.

Have a language expert improve your writing

Run a free plagiarism check in 10 minutes, generate accurate citations for free.

• Knowledge Base
• Academic writing
• How to write a lab report

How To Write A Lab Report | Step-by-Step Guide & Examples

Published on May 20, 2021 by Pritha Bhandari . Revised on July 23, 2023.

A lab report conveys the aim, methods, results, and conclusions of a scientific experiment. The main purpose of a lab report is to demonstrate your understanding of the scientific method by performing and evaluating a hands-on lab experiment. This type of assignment is usually shorter than a research paper .

Lab reports are commonly used in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. This article focuses on how to structure and write a lab report.

Instantly correct all language mistakes in your text

Upload your document to correct all your mistakes in minutes

Table of contents

Structuring a lab report, introduction, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about lab reports.

The sections of a lab report can vary between scientific fields and course requirements, but they usually contain the purpose, methods, and findings of a lab experiment .

Each section of a lab report has its own purpose.

• Title: expresses the topic of your study
• Abstract : summarizes your research aims, methods, results, and conclusions
• Introduction: establishes the context needed to understand the topic
• Method: describes the materials and procedures used in the experiment
• Results: reports all descriptive and inferential statistical analyses
• Discussion: interprets and evaluates results and identifies limitations
• Conclusion: sums up the main findings of your experiment
• References: list of all sources cited using a specific style (e.g. APA )
• Appendices : contains lengthy materials, procedures, tables or figures

Although most lab reports contain these sections, some sections can be omitted or combined with others. For example, some lab reports contain a brief section on research aims instead of an introduction, and a separate conclusion is not always required.

If you’re not sure, it’s best to check your lab report requirements with your instructor.

Here's why students love Scribbr's proofreading services

Discover proofreading & editing

Your title provides the first impression of your lab report – effective titles communicate the topic and/or the findings of your study in specific terms.

Create a title that directly conveys the main focus or purpose of your study. It doesn’t need to be creative or thought-provoking, but it should be informative.

• The effects of varying nitrogen levels on tomato plant height.
• Testing the universality of the McGurk effect.
• Comparing the viscosity of common liquids found in kitchens.

An abstract condenses a lab report into a brief overview of about 150–300 words. It should provide readers with a compact version of the research aims, the methods and materials used, the main results, and the final conclusion.

Think of it as a way of giving readers a preview of your full lab report. Write the abstract last, in the past tense, after you’ve drafted all the other sections of your report, so you’ll be able to succinctly summarize each section.

To write a lab report abstract, use these guiding questions:

• What is the wider context of your study?
• What research question were you trying to answer?
• How did you perform the experiment?
• What did your results show?
• How did you interpret your results?
• What is the importance of your findings?

Nitrogen is a necessary nutrient for high quality plants. Tomatoes, one of the most consumed fruits worldwide, rely on nitrogen for healthy leaves and stems to grow fruit. This experiment tested whether nitrogen levels affected tomato plant height in a controlled setting. It was expected that higher levels of nitrogen fertilizer would yield taller tomato plants.

Levels of nitrogen fertilizer were varied between three groups of tomato plants. The control group did not receive any nitrogen fertilizer, while one experimental group received low levels of nitrogen fertilizer, and a second experimental group received high levels of nitrogen fertilizer. All plants were grown from seeds, and heights were measured 50 days into the experiment.

The effects of nitrogen levels on plant height were tested between groups using an ANOVA. The plants with the highest level of nitrogen fertilizer were the tallest, while the plants with low levels of nitrogen exceeded the control group plants in height. In line with expectations and previous findings, the effects of nitrogen levels on plant height were statistically significant. This study strengthens the importance of nitrogen for tomato plants.

Your lab report introduction should set the scene for your experiment. One way to write your introduction is with a funnel (an inverted triangle) structure:

• Start with the broad, general research topic
• Narrow your topic down your specific study focus
• End with a clear research question

Begin by providing background information on your research topic and explaining why it’s important in a broad real-world or theoretical context. Describe relevant previous research on your topic and note how your study may confirm it or expand it, or fill a gap in the research field.

This lab experiment builds on previous research from Haque, Paul, and Sarker (2011), who demonstrated that tomato plant yield increased at higher levels of nitrogen. However, the present research focuses on plant height as a growth indicator and uses a lab-controlled setting instead.

Next, go into detail on the theoretical basis for your study and describe any directly relevant laws or equations that you’ll be using. State your main research aims and expectations by outlining your hypotheses .

Based on the importance of nitrogen for tomato plants, the primary hypothesis was that the plants with the high levels of nitrogen would grow the tallest. The secondary hypothesis was that plants with low levels of nitrogen would grow taller than plants with no nitrogen.

Your introduction doesn’t need to be long, but you may need to organize it into a few paragraphs or with subheadings such as “Research Context” or “Research Aims.”

Check for common mistakes

Use the best grammar checker available to check for common mistakes in your text.

Fix mistakes for free

A lab report Method section details the steps you took to gather and analyze data. Give enough detail so that others can follow or evaluate your procedures. Write this section in the past tense. If you need to include any long lists of procedural steps or materials, place them in the Appendices section but refer to them in the text here.

You should describe your experimental design, your subjects, materials, and specific procedures used for data collection and analysis.

Experimental design

Briefly note whether your experiment is a within-subjects  or between-subjects design, and describe how your sample units were assigned to conditions if relevant.

A between-subjects design with three groups of tomato plants was used. The control group did not receive any nitrogen fertilizer. The first experimental group received a low level of nitrogen fertilizer, while the second experimental group received a high level of nitrogen fertilizer.

Describe human subjects in terms of demographic characteristics, and animal or plant subjects in terms of genetic background. Note the total number of subjects as well as the number of subjects per condition or per group. You should also state how you recruited subjects for your study.

List the equipment or materials you used to gather data and state the model names for any specialized equipment.

List of materials

35 Tomato seeds

15 plant pots (15 cm tall)

Light lamps (50,000 lux)

Nitrogen fertilizer

Measuring tape

Describe your experimental settings and conditions in detail. You can provide labelled diagrams or images of the exact set-up necessary for experimental equipment. State how extraneous variables were controlled through restriction or by fixing them at a certain level (e.g., keeping the lab at room temperature).

Light levels were fixed throughout the experiment, and the plants were exposed to 12 hours of light a day. Temperature was restricted to between 23 and 25℃. The pH and carbon levels of the soil were also held constant throughout the experiment as these variables could influence plant height. The plants were grown in rooms free of insects or other pests, and they were spaced out adequately.

Your experimental procedure should describe the exact steps you took to gather data in chronological order. You’ll need to provide enough information so that someone else can replicate your procedure, but you should also be concise. Place detailed information in the appendices where appropriate.

In a lab experiment, you’ll often closely follow a lab manual to gather data. Some instructors will allow you to simply reference the manual and state whether you changed any steps based on practical considerations. Other instructors may want you to rewrite the lab manual procedures as complete sentences in coherent paragraphs, while noting any changes to the steps that you applied in practice.

If you’re performing extensive data analysis, be sure to state your planned analysis methods as well. This includes the types of tests you’ll perform and any programs or software you’ll use for calculations (if relevant).

First, tomato seeds were sown in wooden flats containing soil about 2 cm below the surface. Each seed was kept 3-5 cm apart. The flats were covered to keep the soil moist until germination. The seedlings were removed and transplanted to pots 8 days later, with a maximum of 2 plants to a pot. Each pot was watered once a day to keep the soil moist.

The nitrogen fertilizer treatment was applied to the plant pots 12 days after transplantation. The control group received no treatment, while the first experimental group received a low concentration, and the second experimental group received a high concentration. There were 5 pots in each group, and each plant pot was labelled to indicate the group the plants belonged to.

50 days after the start of the experiment, plant height was measured for all plants. A measuring tape was used to record the length of the plant from ground level to the top of the tallest leaf.

In your results section, you should report the results of any statistical analysis procedures that you undertook. You should clearly state how the results of statistical tests support or refute your initial hypotheses.

The main results to report include:

• any descriptive statistics
• statistical test results
• the significance of the test results
• estimates of standard error or confidence intervals

The mean heights of the plants in the control group, low nitrogen group, and high nitrogen groups were 20.3, 25.1, and 29.6 cm respectively. A one-way ANOVA was applied to calculate the effect of nitrogen fertilizer level on plant height. The results demonstrated statistically significant ( p = .03) height differences between groups.

Next, post-hoc tests were performed to assess the primary and secondary hypotheses. In support of the primary hypothesis, the high nitrogen group plants were significantly taller than the low nitrogen group and the control group plants. Similarly, the results supported the secondary hypothesis: the low nitrogen plants were taller than the control group plants.

These results can be reported in the text or in tables and figures. Use text for highlighting a few key results, but present large sets of numbers in tables, or show relationships between variables with graphs.

You should also include sample calculations in the Results section for complex experiments. For each sample calculation, provide a brief description of what it does and use clear symbols. Present your raw data in the Appendices section and refer to it to highlight any outliers or trends.

The Discussion section will help demonstrate your understanding of the experimental process and your critical thinking skills.

In this section, you can:

• Interpret your results
• Compare your findings with your expectations
• Identify any sources of experimental error
• Explain any unexpected results
• Suggest possible improvements for further studies

Interpreting your results involves clarifying how your results help you answer your main research question. Report whether your results support your hypotheses.

• Did you measure what you sought out to measure?
• Were your analysis procedures appropriate for this type of data?

Compare your findings with other research and explain any key differences in findings.

• Are your results in line with those from previous studies or your classmates’ results? Why or why not?

An effective Discussion section will also highlight the strengths and limitations of a study.

• Did you have high internal validity or reliability?
• How did you establish these aspects of your study?

When describing limitations, use specific examples. For example, if random error contributed substantially to the measurements in your study, state the particular sources of error (e.g., imprecise apparatus) and explain ways to improve them.

The results support the hypothesis that nitrogen levels affect plant height, with increasing levels producing taller plants. These statistically significant results are taken together with previous research to support the importance of nitrogen as a nutrient for tomato plant growth.

However, unlike previous studies, this study focused on plant height as an indicator of plant growth in the present experiment. Importantly, plant height may not always reflect plant health or fruit yield, so measuring other indicators would have strengthened the study findings.

Another limitation of the study is the plant height measurement technique, as the measuring tape was not suitable for plants with extreme curvature. Future studies may focus on measuring plant height in different ways.

The main strengths of this study were the controls for extraneous variables, such as pH and carbon levels of the soil. All other factors that could affect plant height were tightly controlled to isolate the effects of nitrogen levels, resulting in high internal validity for this study.

Your conclusion should be the final section of your lab report. Here, you’ll summarize the findings of your experiment, with a brief overview of the strengths and limitations, and implications of your study for further research.

Some lab reports may omit a Conclusion section because it overlaps with the Discussion section, but you should check with your instructor before doing so.

If you want to know more about AI for academic writing, AI tools, or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy
• Deep learning
• Generative AI
• Machine learning
• Reinforcement learning
• Supervised vs. unsupervised learning

 (AI) Tools

• Grammar Checker
• Paraphrasing Tool
• Text Summarizer
• AI Detector
• Plagiarism Checker
• Citation Generator

A lab report conveys the aim, methods, results, and conclusions of a scientific experiment . Lab reports are commonly assigned in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.

The purpose of a lab report is to demonstrate your understanding of the scientific method with a hands-on lab experiment. Course instructors will often provide you with an experimental design and procedure. Your task is to write up how you actually performed the experiment and evaluate the outcome.

In contrast, a research paper requires you to independently develop an original argument. It involves more in-depth research and interpretation of sources and data.

A lab report is usually shorter than a research paper.

The sections of a lab report can vary between scientific fields and course requirements, but it usually contains the following:

• Abstract: summarizes your research aims, methods, results, and conclusions
• References: list of all sources cited using a specific style (e.g. APA)
• Appendices: contains lengthy materials, procedures, tables or figures

The results chapter or section simply and objectively reports what you found, without speculating on why you found these results. The discussion interprets the meaning of the results, puts them in context, and explains why they matter.

In qualitative research , results and discussion are sometimes combined. But in quantitative research , it’s considered important to separate the objective results from your interpretation of them.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Bhandari, P. (2023, July 23). How To Write A Lab Report | Step-by-Step Guide & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved August 3, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-writing/lab-report/

Is this article helpful?

Pritha Bhandari

Other students also liked, guide to experimental design | overview, steps, & examples, how to write an apa methods section, how to write an apa results section, "i thought ai proofreading was useless but..".

I've been using Scribbr for years now and I know it's a service that won't disappoint. It does a good job spotting mistakes”

Descriptive Writing with Adjectives: Mad Science Writing Lab

Description

Writing with Adjectives

Use this Mad Science Writing Lab to teach your students how to write descriptions with adjectives.

This creative writing lesson is perfect for Halloween--or for any time you want to engage your students.

Students will imagine wonderful and strange things hissing and fizzing in a mad scientist’s lab. Students will name and write a description for each item. Students will use their descriptions to write paragraphs about the mad scientist’s lab.

To help your students write good descriptions and paragraphs, samples and models are provided for each lesson.

What You Receive:

• Lesson Plans The lesson plans detail how to use this writing lab over the course of three days.
• Mad Science Lab Ideas This file includes a page of ideas for how to create a lab to inspire your students. You can make your lab as simple or as extravagant as you want.
• Printables Every printable you need is in the PDF; it includes printable pages to go with each day of the lesson.
• Videos This download includes three videos to help you teach your students about adjectives, writing descriptions, and writing paragraphs. You can use these videos like you would use a slideshow. Pause when you need time to teach, ask questions, or answer questions.

Questions & Answers

Tip-top printables.

• We're hiring
• Help & FAQ
• Privacy policy
• Student privacy
• Terms of service
• Tell us what you think

Complete Guide to Writing a Lab Report (With Example)

Students tend to approach writing lab reports with confusion and dread. Whether in high school science classes or undergraduate laboratories, experiments are always fun and games until the times comes to submit a lab report. What if we didn’t need to spend hours agonizing over this piece of scientific writing? Our lives would be so much easier if we were told what information to include, what to do with all their data and how to use references. Well, here’s a guide to all the core components in a well-written lab report, complete with an example.

Things to Include in a Laboratory Report

The laboratory report is simply a way to show that you understand the link between theory and practice while communicating through clear and concise writing. As with all forms of writing, it’s not the report’s length that matters, but the quality of the information conveyed within. This article outlines the important bits that go into writing a lab report (title, abstract, introduction, method, results, discussion, conclusion, reference). At the end is an example report of reducing sugar analysis with Benedict’s reagent.

The report’s title should be short but descriptive, indicating the qualitative or quantitative nature of the practical along with the primary goal or area of focus.

Following this should be the abstract, 2-3 sentences summarizing the practical. The abstract shows the reader the main results of the practical and helps them decide quickly whether the rest of the report is relevant to their use. Remember that the whole report should be written in a passive voice .

Introduction

The introduction provides context to the experiment in a couple of paragraphs and relevant diagrams. While a short preamble outlining the history of the techniques or materials used in the practical is appropriate, the bulk of the introduction should outline the experiment’s goals, creating a logical flow to the next section.

Some reports require you to write down the materials used, which can be combined with this section. The example below does not include a list of materials used. If unclear, it is best to check with your teacher or demonstrator before writing your lab report from scratch.

Step-by-step methods are usually provided in high school and undergraduate laboratory practicals, so it’s just a matter of paraphrasing them. This is usually the section that teachers and demonstrators care the least about. Any unexpected changes to the experimental setup or techniques can also be documented here.

The results section should include the raw data that has been collected in the experiment as well as calculations that are performed. It is usually appropriate to include diagrams; depending on the experiment, these can range from scatter plots to chromatograms.

The discussion is the most critical part of the lab report as it is a chance for you to show that you have a deep understanding of the practical and the theory behind it. Teachers and lecturers tend to give this section the most weightage when marking the report. It would help if you used the discussion section to address several points:

• Explain the results gathered. Is there a particular trend? Do the results support the theory behind the experiment?
• Highlight any unexpected results or outlying data points. What are possible sources of error?
• Address the weaknesses of the experiment. Refer to the materials and methods used to identify improvements that would yield better results (more accurate equipment, better experimental technique, etc.)  

Finally, a short paragraph to conclude the laboratory report. It should summarize the findings and provide an objective review of the experiment.

If any external sources were used in writing the lab report, they should go here. Referencing is critical in scientific writing; it’s like giving a shout out (known as a citation) to the original provider of the information. It is good practice to have at least one source referenced, either from researching the context behind the experiment, best practices for the method used or similar industry standards.

Google Scholar is a good resource for quickly gathering references of a specific style . Searching for the article in the search bar and clicking on the ‘cite’ button opens a pop-up that allows you to copy and paste from several common referencing styles.

Example: Writing a Lab Report

Title : Semi-Quantitative Analysis of Food Products using Benedict’s Reagent

Abstract : Food products (milk, chicken, bread, orange juice) were solubilized and tested for reducing sugars using Benedict’s reagent. Milk contained the highest level of reducing sugars at ~2%, while chicken contained almost no reducing sugars.

Introduction : Sugar detection has been of interest for over 100 years, with the first test for glucose using copper sulfate developed by German chemist Karl Trommer in 1841. It was used to test the urine of diabetics, where sugar was present in high amounts. However, it wasn’t until 1907 when the method was perfected by Stanley Benedict, using sodium citrate and sodium carbonate to stabilize the copper sulfate in solution. Benedict’s reagent is a bright blue because of the copper sulfate, turning green and then red as the concentration of reducing sugars increases.

Benedict’s reagent was used in this experiment to compare the amount of reducing sugars between four food items: milk, chicken solution, bread and orange juice. Following this, standardized glucose solutions (0.0%, 0.5%, 1.0%, 1.5%, 2.0%) were tested with Benedict’s reagent to determine the color produced at those sugar levels, allowing us to perform a semi-quantitative analysis of the food items.

Method : Benedict’s reagent was prepared by mixing 1.73 g of copper (II) sulfate pentahydrate, 17.30 g of sodium citrate pentahydrate and 10.00 g of sodium carbonate anhydrous. The mixture was dissolved with stirring and made up to 100 ml using distilled water before filtration using filter paper and a funnel to remove any impurities.

4 ml of milk, chicken solution and orange juice (commercially available) were measured in test tubes, along with 4 ml of bread solution. The bread solution was prepared using 4 g of dried bread ground with mortar and pestle before diluting with distilled water up to 4 ml. Then, 4 ml of Benedict’s reagent was added to each test tube and placed in a boiling water bath for 5 minutes, then each test tube was observed.

Next, glucose solutions were prepared by dissolving 0.5 g, 1.0 g, 1.5 g and 2.0 g of glucose in 100 ml of distilled water to produce 0.5%, 1.0%, 1.5% and 2.0% solutions, respectively. 4 ml of each solution was added to 4 ml of Benedict’s reagent in a test tube and placed in a boiling water bath for 5 minutes, then each test tube was observed.

Results : Food Solutions (4 ml) with Benedict’s Reagent (4 ml)

Glucose Solutions (4 ml) with Benedict’s Reagent (4 ml)

Semi-Quantitative Analysis from Data

Discussion : From the analysis of food solutions along with the glucose solutions of known concentrations, the semi-quantitative analysis of sugar levels in different food products was performed. Milk had the highest sugar content of 2%, with orange juice at 1.5%, bread at 0.5% and chicken with 0% sugar. These values were approximated; the standard solutions were not the exact color of the food solutions, but the closest color match was chosen.

One point of contention was using the orange juice solution, which conferred color to the starting solution, rendering it green before the reaction started. This could have led to the final color (and hence, sugar quantity) being inaccurate. Also, since comparing colors using eyesight alone is inaccurate, the experiment could be improved with a colorimeter that can accurately determine the exact wavelength of light absorbed by the solution.

Another downside of Benedict’s reagent is its inability to react with non-reducing sugars. Reducing sugars encompass all sugar types that can be oxidized from aldehydes or ketones into carboxylic acids. This means that all monosaccharides (glucose, fructose, etc.) are reducing sugars, while only select polysaccharides are. Disaccharides like sucrose and trehalose cannot be oxidized, hence are non-reducing and will not react with Benedict’s reagent. Furthermore, Benedict’s reagent cannot distinguish between different types of reducing sugars.

Conclusion : Using Benedict’s reagent, different food products were analyzed semi-quantitatively for their levels of reducing sugars. Milk contained around 2% sugar, while the chicken solution had no sugar. Overall, the experiment was a success, although the accuracy of the results could have been improved with the use of quantitative equipment and methods.

Reference :

• Raza, S. I., Raza, S. A., Kazmi, M., Khan, S., & Hussain, I. (2021). 100 Years of Glucose Monitoring in Diabetes Management.  Journal of Diabetes Mellitus ,  11 (5), 221-233.
• Benedict, Stanley R (1909). A Reagent for the Detection of Reducing Sugars.  Journal of Biological Chemistry ,  5 , 485-487.

Using this guide and example, writing a lab report should be a hassle-free, perhaps even enjoyable process!

About the Author

Sean is a consultant for clients in the pharmaceutical industry and is an associate lecturer at La Trobe University, where unfortunate undergrads are subject to his ramblings on chemistry and pharmacology.

You Might Also Like…

An introductory guide to atomic force microscopy (afm).

All You Need To Know About Covid-19 Testing

If our content has been helpful to you, please consider supporting our independent science publishing efforts: for just $1 a month.

© 2023 FTLOScience • All Rights Reserved

• Science Notes Posts
• Contact Science Notes
• Todd Helmenstine Biography
• Anne Helmenstine Biography
• Free Printable Periodic Tables (PDF and PNG)
• Periodic Table Wallpapers
• Interactive Periodic Table
• Periodic Table Posters
• Science Experiments for Kids
• How to Grow Crystals
• Chemistry Projects
• Fire and Flames Projects
• Holiday Science
• Chemistry Problems With Answers
• Physics Problems
• Unit Conversion Example Problems
• Chemistry Worksheets
• Biology Worksheets
• Periodic Table Worksheets
• Physical Science Worksheets
• Science Lab Worksheets
• My Amazon Books

Lab Report Format – How to Write a Laboratory Report

A science laboratory experiment isn’t truly complete until you’ve written the lab report. You may have taken excellent notes in your laboratory notebook, but it isn’t the same as a lab report. The lab report format is designed to present experimental results so they can be shared with others. A well-written report explains what you did, why you did it, and what you learned. It should also generate reader interest, potentially leading to peer-reviewed publication and funding.

Sections of a Lab Report

There is no one lab report format. The format and sections might be specified by your instructor or employer. What really matters is covering all of the important information.

Label the sections (except the title). Use bold face type for the title and headings. The order is:

You may or may not be expected to provide a title page. If it is required, the title page includes the title of the experiment, the names of the researchers, the name of the institution, and the date.

The title describes the experiment. Don’t start it with an article (e.g., the, an, a) because it messes up databases and isn’t necessary. For example, a good title might be, “Effect of Increasing Glucose Concentration on Danio rerio Egg Hatching Rates.” Use title case and italicize the scientific names of any species.

Introduction

Sometimes the introduction is broken into separate sections. Otherwise, it’s written as a narrative that includes the following information:

• State the purpose of the experiment.
• State the hypothesis.
• Review earlier work on the subject. Refer to previous studies. Cover the background so a reader understands what is known about a subject and what you hope to learn that is new.
• Describe your approach to answering a question or solving a problem. Include a theory or equation, if appropriate.

This section describes experimental design. Identify the parameter you changed ( independent variable ) and the one you measured ( dependent variable ). Describe the equipment and set-up you used, materials, and methods. If a reader can’t picture the apparatus from your description, include a photograph or diagram. Sometimes this section is broken into “Materials” and “Methods.”

Your lab notebook contains all of the data you collected in the experiment. You aren’t expected to reproduce all of this in a lab report. Instead, provide labelled tables and graphs. The first figure is Figure 1, the second is Figure 2, etc. The first graph is Graph 1. Refer to figures and graphs by their figure number. For some experiments, you may need to include labelled photographs. Cite the results of any calculations you performed, such as slope and standard deviation. Discuss sources of error here, including instrument, standard, and random errors.

Discussion or Conclusions

While the “Results” section includes graphs and tables, the “Discussion” or “Conclusions” section focuses on what the results mean. This is where you state whether or not the objective of the experiment was met and what the outcome means.  Propose reasons for discrepancies between expected and actual outcomes. Finally, describe the next logical step in your research and ways you might improve on the experiment.

References or Bibliography

Did you build upon work conducted by someone else? Cite the work. Did you consult a paper relating to the experiment? Credit the author. If you’re unsure whether to cite a reference or not, a good rule of thumb is to include a reference for any fact not known to your audience. For some reports, it’s only necessary to list publications directly relating to your procedure and conclusions.

The Tone of a Lab Report

Lab reports should be informative, not entertaining. This isn’t the place for humor, sarcasm, or flowery prose. A lab report should be:

• Concise : Cover all the key points without getting crazy with the details.
• Objective : In the “Conclusions” section, you can propose possible explanations for your results. Otherwise, keep your opinions out of the report. Instead, present facts and an analysis based on logic and math.
• Critical : After presenting what you did, the report focuses on what the data means. Be on the lookout for sources of error and identify them. Use your understanding of error to determine how reliable your results are and gauge confidence in your conclusions.

Related Posts

Find out why teachers and school leaders love PlanBee

• 📚 Cross-Curricular Topics
• ✂️ Design & Technology
• ♻️ Education for Social Responsibility
• 🌍 Geography
• ⛪️ Religious Education
• 🎉 Special Days
• 🦸‍♀️ Special People
• Vision and Principles
• Our Curriculum Offer
• Curriculum Packs
• Become a School Subscriber
• FREE Schemes of Work
• Learn at Home
• Objective Checker
• How does it work?

Describe the Scene: Science Laboratory

Give your children the opportunity to get creative and practise their descriptive writing skills with this fun Science Laboratory Describe the Scene picture!

Did you know we have lots of free resources , including this Toy Factory Describe the Scene picture ?

What's Your Email?

Customer Reviews

Added to your cart:, let customers speak for us.

Very cute! Perfect for an introduction.

We're pleased you like the resource, Theresa!

Diwali Pictures Pack

Thanks, Jayne!

What's My Number?

Thanks, Kirsten!

I really like the display cards which are clear and concise with enough information to spark children's interest.

Thanks, Ruth - we're so pleased to hear that you're happy with these resources :-)

Unfortunately, I took out the 7 day free access when I was very busy so only had a Quick Look! It has run out now. Looked good.

Hi Davina, thank you for taking the time to leave us a review! We hope to see you at the hive again soon :-)

• Things to do

2024 Passion For Painting Exhibition

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Copy this link

Every day, all day Sunday 4 August to Saturday 31 August

Marlene Antico OAM Founder of the Paddington Art Prize handed over the reins to her son Chris Antico and daughter Pia Antico in 2023; with them taking over as Principal Sponsor and Art Prize Coordinator, respectively.

Having freed herself from executive control of the prize, Marlene fostered her decades long desire to provide an additional  opportunity for unrepresented  f inalists  to have their artwork exhibited and sold. With this in mind, Marlene conceived of the adjunct personally curated online exhibition  'Passion For Painting'.

Passion For Painting  exhibition aims to display the variety of ways contemporary artists experienced and painted the Australian landscape over the past 18 months.

It is Marlene's hope to continue this adjunct online exhibition project for many years to come, alongside the continued growth of the Paddington Art Prize, now in its 21st year.

A digital exhibition of 6 artists selected from unrepresented finalists of the most recent Paddington Art Prize – Exhibition of National Finalists. Curated by Paddington Art Prize Founder, Marlene Antico OAM

Anthony Buselli Louisa Chircop Julie Nicholson Mark O'Hara Caitlin Reilly Douglas Schofield

All artworks are for sale during August 2024.

https://www.paddingtonartprize.com.au/passionforpainting

2024 Paddington Art Prize entries close on August 18th, 5pm

https://linktr.ee/paddingtonartprize

Main image: Louisa Chircop 'Liquid Wake' Mixed media and photomontage on Yupo paper 38 x 48 cm. For sale $1,200

Contact event organiser

Paddington Art Prize

Are we missing something?

Advertisement

Other events at Online

Grants and sponsorship briefing sessions, bringing characters to life with amy lovat, children’s books writing course with belinda murrell, creative non-fiction course with zoya patel, creative women of own virtual gallery, learn to crochet and make a granny square course, poetry feedback course with ivy ireland, screen acting classes.

Discover the best events that Sydney has to offer