Lab Reports and Scientific Papers: A Practical Reason for Understanding Rhetorical Situations

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One of the basic concepts that college undergrads encounter in their rhetoric and composition classes is the idea of the rhetorical situation and the need to be able to correctly assess different rhetorical situations and to adapt their writing to fit them.

Simply put, rhetoric is using language to educate, entertain, inform, or persuade. A rhetorical situation consists of the circumstances in which you find yourself writing.  Factors which usually comprise a rhetorical situation include the writer, the purpose, the audience, the topic, and the culture in which you write.

Although a paper you might write for a humanities class and a biology class have some similarities (clarity, a well-supported thesis, specific support, and good grammar, for example), there are some differences based the different rhetorical situations brought on by writing within different disciplines.  It's sometimes hard for students to understand why what one teacher wants in an assignment is not the same as what another one requires.  This sometimes seems arbitrary to them, but more often than not, it's related to differences in the rhetorical situations brought about by writing in different academic disciplines which are their own discourse communities with their own rules and expectations.  Understanding those differences will help you do better on your assignments in the hard sciences.

The first area to look at is how lab reports and scientific papers are structured.  Scientific writing follows a very specific format.

 Most lab reports and scientific papers are made up of the following parts: title page, abstract, introduction, materials and methods, results, discussions, and references.  The title page includes the name of the paper or experiment, the authors of the paper or students included in conducting the experiment, and the date.  The abstract summarizes the purpose, findings, and conclusions of the experiment whereas the introduction contains a statement of objectives and background information.  In the methods and materials section you should provide a list of the materials used and the procedures used for the experiment or study.  The results section contains the major findings of the study or experiment. You should include any calculations or data in this section.  Next, the discussions section is where you provide your interpretation or analysis of what you presented in the results section.  Finally, in the reference section you want to provide a full citation for any source material included in your paper or report.

The second area to look at would be writing conventions which differ among disciplines. The following list covers general criteria for scientific writing.

• Be sure the title is concise and that it adequately describes the contents. It should be short, straight to the point, and very literal. 
• Be sure you have used headings to label each section of your report or paper. 
• Make sure the sections follow the order listed above.
• Make sure the tone and style follow the general conventions for scientific writing.  As a rule, writing in the hard sciences is intended to be factual rather than entertaining.  Writers tend to avoid rhetorical devices that are used in the liberal arts and humanities such as descriptive language (not to be confused with  factual descriptions or observations), anecdotes, personal opinion, humor or dialogue.
• Another contrast to the general conventions of writing for liberal arts and humanities is the use of passive voice in scientific writing.  Passive voice is the preferred construction over active voice.  In a sentence where active voice is being used, the subject performs the action indicated by the verb. For example, in the sentence, "I put solution X onto the lab slide, " the subject (I) is performing the action (put) indicated by the verb. Sometimes, when students don't really understand the problem, they try to correct it by using third person rather than first which leads to a sentence like this: "The student put solution X onto the lab slide." However, the subject (the student) is still performing the action indicated by the verb (put).  In passive voice, the subject does not perform the action.  Our sample sentence, when switched to passive voice, would then be written as follows:  "Solution X was put onto the lab slide." In this case, the subject of the sentence (solution x) isn't actually doing anything. Instead, the action is being performed on it.  Another clue that this is written in passive voice is the past tense linking verb "was" which is used with the action verb (put).
• Past tense should be used in the methods and materials section.
• Present tense is used when describing results and conclusions.
• The procedure should be written in narrative format, in chronological order.
• Sentences should be short and to the point. Facts should be expressed clearly and concisely.
• Conventional scientific symbols and abbreviations should be used.
• Any figures and tables should be correctly numbered and should be accompanied with an explanatory caption.  They should also be introduced in the text before they appear.

Of course these are general expectations.  If you have received instructions from your teacher which state something different, you should defer to his or her expectations.

More detailed information about best practices for writing in the sciences can be found here: Writing the Scientific Paper.