Formal report tips by Bristol Chaos

Formal Report Tips Harry Birch March 13, 2017

Introduction

I’m a 4th year who has had lots of critical reviews of my reports! These are a few of the things which perhaps don’t always correlate to higher or lower marks but are important to make your report give a great impression that you know what you’re doing! Some of these points might only be important for later years but the ones marked with a ‘*’ you should be doing even in your first report! Your introduction goes here! Some examples of commonly used commands and features are listed below, to help you get started. If you have a question, please use the help menu (“?”) on the top bar to search for help or ask us a question.

Learn to use Latex

It makes your report look professional and it’s a great skill to learn. You can put it on a CV, use it to write your CV, and if you put the effort in you’ll end up writing the reports much faster. It’s free marks to get the format working well.

Be concise

You really don’t want to write too much. You want to write clearly too so don’t be afraid of using full stops as these limit long sentences which are usually confusing.

Punctuate your equations

Integrate your equations fully into he sentences. This means using punctuation in and around equations. For example the relationship between punctuating equations and formality can be shown to be f ormality ≈ epunctuation , (1) which shows that it really does count. Plus equations are easy to do in latex so use latex.

Element naming

This a small point and not totally consistent but if you need to refer to an element, either use it’s chemical symbol (e.g. Fe) or use lower case for the element name i.e. iron NOT Iron

Units

Don’t have your units in italics and make sure there’s a space between the unit and the value. i.e. a = 7.5 JT−1 and not work = 7.5 JT −1 .

Variable notation

If you refer to variables in text and in an equation, makes sure they are consistently formatted. I.e. don’t state some variable ’x’ somewhere and then use it later as ’x’. Having one in italics and one not is inconsistent and can be confusing.

Explain variables

Don’t lose marks for simply not stating what all the variables are in your equations. If you forget to do this (which is very easy to) they will notice and are likely to penalise you.

Errors

Only quote the value you’ve determined to the same precision to that of your error. For example (5.3747539 ± 0.1) J does not make sense – you can’t know what the decimal points are after if you’re uncertain to the first decimal place! Note also how the units work here – don’t do 5.5 J ± 0.1 J as quoting the units twice is unnecessary ad looks bad. (5.5 ± 0.1) J is good.

Math mode

Make sure to check vectors are bolded, and you use the dot/ cross product. Again, make sure if it’s bold in one place, it’s bold everywhere.

Referencing equipment

You can normally find this if you search in google for the product, then they’ll tell you how to reference it in the manuals. They are normally really helpful as they normally come from a company that designed the product for the lab experiment you’ve done so they can describe what you did succinctly.

Referencing

Using Google Scholar is usually a safe bet - if you just have the name of an article say, you can search for it and it will give you the date/ authors etc. If you want to do it properly whilst using LaTeX, I’d suggest looking into Mendeley – you can download papers into it, read and annotate and it will produce the bibliography link for you. You can point LaTeX to the file and it will include your files in your referencing automatically! Check it out here: https://blog.mendeley.com/2011/10/25/howto-use-mendeley-to-create-citationsusing-latex-and-bibtex/

Graphs

Make the graph labels have the same font as the text, it looks loads better! If you can’t get the exact font, Times New Roman will normally be close enough for LaTeX. If you made your graphs in Origin you can add axes to the top and right side (in addition to bottom and left). To do this, select Graph, layer management, axes, tick top and right, (probably remove the tick labels or put them in) click apply then OK. This will make the graphs stand out! The default Origin marker for a data point is quite big and can hide information. A small cross I think looks good. Add error bars to your measurements. If you can’t, suggest that they are too small to be seen or what the dominant source of error is so it’s very small. Units on the graphs – say all your information is 1040 , it’s good to put this general factor in the actual caption. So for example if all your measurements are all between 1x103 Hz and 6x103 Hz, 2

then put your units on your graph to be kHz and then all the values directly on the graph as just 1-6. If you can’t do this, then double click the values and make sure they’re in the form of ‘scientific’ so they appear as 1 × 104 NOT 1E + 03. Origin sometimes puts lots of significant figures in as well, you probably only need 1 or 2 really. In general, put as much information in a graph as you can, it makes the report concise and look good I think! Make sure you plot the dependent on the y axis, independent on the x axis

Figure 1: This is an example of a bad graph.

Figure 2: This is an example of a better graph.

Referencing

All references should be in the bibliography, don’t put website links in the paper (easy with Latex) [1].

Reference numbering

Leave references like this [1] not like this[2]. Keep it them relevant to the topic and if you need to do multiple references in a row, you can do [1,2]. Put it before the full stop also (i.e. don’t do this. [4]) If you’re using latex then referencing is easy, it’s ordered and sorted automatically, yet another reason for latex [3].

Discussion

Discuss your dominant sources of error, how did you reduce them and are they systematic/ random. More than that though, discuss why your value is important – this can be done usually on 2 levels. Firstly, i.e. knowing specific heat for a substance can be used to determine blah But also, by comparing the specific heat between lots of elements, you can see that say metals interact differently than non-metals, therefore you know something about their electronic configuration. Personally, that’s the most important thing I think you want to get to in the heart of your discussion – why is your value important! You want to sell the value, and what you’ve done, but be critical at the same time. (usually, don’t put partial differentiation equations in for errors – it’s assumed you’ve done it properly!)

Writing order

Typically it’s easier to start with the theory, experimental method and results. Once you have learnt the theory and are into why your topic is important then you can work on the discussion. Then you can do the introduction and conclusion (intro you want to give a brief overview of general context, then what you’ve done and why it’s so important) then conclusion sum up the key values and key things you did, then finally repeat in the abstract again but more succinctly.

References [1] P.J. Mohr, B.N. Taylor, and D.B. Newell The 2010 CODATA Recommended Values of the Fundamental Physical Constants National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland 20899-8420, USA (2010) [2] Jungmin Kang and Frank N. von Hippel U-232 and the Proliferation Resistance of U-233 in Spent Fuel, Science and Global Security, Volume 9 pp 1-32 (2001) [3] Yellow Springs Instruments, Inc YSI Precision Thermistors (1977) [4] Data Sheet Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, UK (2011)