Guide to Writing a Project Report

The following notes provide a guideline to report writing, and more generally to writing a scientific article. Please take the time to read them carefully. Even if your project did not go as well as you had hoped, there is no reason why you should not score a high mark for you report if you are prepared to work at it.

1. Why a report?

The production of a good piece of technical writing for a project report is as much a part of the project as doing the experimental work. However excellent and original a piece of work the project may be, unless the results can be communicated to other people it may as well not have been done! Communicating results of an investigation in a clear and useful way is a key part of science and is the reason for devoting a lot of effort to this aspect.

2. What level?

The main part of the report should be comprehensible by other stage 3 students. If more detailed information is to be included about some aspects (for instance, a complicated mathematical derivation, of which only the result is essential to the main discussion) consider including this as an appendix.

3. How much detail to include?

It is not necessary, or even desirable; to describe every minute detail of what was done. One of the most important aspects of good technical writing is to be concise, yet remain informative. The ability to select what is essential, and to omit what is merely incidental detail, is a skill every scientist needs to develop. In view of this, the main part of your report should be restricted to at most 4000 words. This is an upper limit and not the length that is expected (a typical report would be 2000 words). An overlong report is liable to receive a lower mark than it otherwise deserves.

4. The nuts and bolts.

Two copies of the report need to be submitted. Students who have worked in pairs must write and present independent reports, stressing those aspects of the project for which they were individually responsible.

5. Format of reports.

Whilst not mandatory, there are good reasons for the usual format of a report. Sections that you need to include are,

• Title
  
• Authors
  
• Abstract
  
• Table of contents
  
• Introduction
  
• Experimental techniques and methods
  
• Results and discussion
  
• Summary/conclusions
  
• References
  
• Appendices (if used)
  

In more detail,

5.1. First Page.

This should contain the title, the author(s) and the date.

Title.

This should convey the area and scope of the project.

For example,

Rainbows is poor Ð is this an investigation of the occurrence of rainbows in medieval illuminated manuscripts? or their use as metaphors in popular art? Or what?

A better choice might be Rainbows: the deflection of light by liquid droplets and the determination of droplet refractive index from measurements of rainbow phenomena.

5.2. Second Page.

The Abstract.

The second page should consist only of the abstract. The idea of the abstract is to provide a brief summary of the report. The reader should be able to pick up from the abstract what the abstract entailed, how it was undertaken and an indication of what was found out. An abstract should not review the report, but should rather act as a sampler of the contents of the report. Typically the abstract should be less than 200 words.

A poor example of title and abstract might be, The length of a piece of wood.