Report Guidelines | Reports | PowerPoints | CAD Files | Training Materials | Miscellaneous Documents | Project site reports

Download the Report Template for an example of how to create a document with Figures, Tables, Equations and all using Styles. Use the template to write your report so you have access to the styles and can get all of the formatting correct.

Interim Reports

Use the interim reports to document your progress. Compare your progress with the road map that you prepared at the beginning of the semester. If you are departing from that road map, justify any changes and explain how you will adjust your approach to meet your semester goals. include examples of the work that you have done thus far as drawings, graphs, or computer code. Use the Report Template to create the Interim Report and make sure to add a title page that includes a list of all of the contributors to the report.

Draft Final Report

A very good draft with all components of the report in place. Don't implement text wrapping around figures and don't format the bibliography at this stage. You should have the RefWorks citations in the text at the appropriate places. Before submitting this the report sections must be reviewed by team members who didn't write those sections. Use reviewer features of Word and track changes and submit it to me by email or by telling me where it is located on the AguaClara server. The draft version must show the revisions using Word's review features.

I will accept all of the revisions proposed by your reviewers and will make my own comments and proposed revisions. I will return it to your team by email or by returning it to the AguaClara server.

Final Report Submission

Take the version of the report that I sent you and keep my comments and revisions. Make the changes/corrections/additions that I request while tracking changes in Word. Do not delete any of my comments and make sure that you add comments addressing my comments! I know this often gets messy, but this approach saves lots of time in the final review. Save a copy of this file containing all of the editing, revisions, and comments. Then with another copy of the file accept all of the changes, delete all of the comments, and do the final formatting including building the bibliography using RefWorks. Send me an email telling me where to get both versions of the file for the final review and grade.

Final Report writing Guidelines

The following report sections were originally designed for research oriented reports. If your work is oriented toward design you will have a different type of "results and discussion" section. Instead of focusing on data you will focus on the designs that you have created and a discussion of the salient features of those designs including the basis of the design. You can show graphics of the design work that you produced.

Abstract

Write a brief abstract that summarizes your report. Remember that some readers will only read the abstract, so make sure it contains the most important information.

Introduction and Objectives

Write a paragraph on the goals of your team project. Why did you decide to do this project? How does this project connect with the AguaClara goals? Introduce your approach to solving the problem you were working on by explaining what needs to be done to meet your goal. What did you hope to learn? How did you expect your work to guide the construction of water treatment plants or to improve drinking water quality in the Global South?

Procedures

Provide an overview of the methods that you used in your investigation. The best procedures give an overview of the method with an explanation of why you used those methods. When method development is part of your project, a detailed description of the methods should be included. Methods and procedures need to be detailed enough so that one of your classmates could duplicate your work.

Results and discussion

Present results in a clearly labeled format. Avoid tables unless that really is the best way to present the data. Graphs and tables should be presented in this section (not as an appendix). [See the section on graphing for further guidance on data presentation.] The report text should refer to each figure and table. Graphs should be sized so that they are easily readable, but not so large that they take an entire page. Use text wrapping around the Figures and Tables when possible.

Use a table to show relevant experimental parameters (such as measured flow rates, sample sizes, concentrations of reagents, etc.) in your report if appropriate.

Compare theoretical expectations with your results and discuss reasons for any observed deviations. If the results weren't as expected, suggest reasons why the laboratory results may have differed from theory and suggest improved techniques to obtain more accurate results or modifications to the theory to better describe the simulation.

Conclusions

The conclusions section should not include any new observations, but is the place to summarize the results in a few sentences. Make sure you connect your conclusions to your objectives for doing the research.

References

Use to build your bibliography. Write-N-Cite can be installed as an Add-In to Microsoft Word to automatically format your bibliography. Don't format the bibliography until you are completely finished with your report.

For students researching for AguaClara, references can be easily organized using the AguaClara RefWorks Database (username aguaclara, then clearwater). Add references, see references already cited, and easily add your references to reports using Write-N-Cite! You can even add a RefWorks extension to Google Scholar so you can automatically import Google Scholar citations into your RefWorks database. Go to Google Scholar and select preferences (or click here) and then in the Bibliography manager section set it to import citations into RefWorks.

Editing checklist

	wrong	right
Use symbol font for symbols	ug	mg
One space between numbers and units	5mg	5 mg
No leading decimals	.3 g	0.3 g
Graph captions	Graph 1. blah blah blah	Figure 1. blah blah blah
Figure captions	above table	below table
Table captions	below table	above table

Use Styles to format the paragraphs in the report. That means that you don't do any special formatting of text. There may not be any double carriage returns or double tabs or double spaces in the report. For information on styles you can search for "styles" in Microsoft Word help and then follow the link to "formatting with styles".

Use Times New Roman 12.

Use an Equation editor or MathCAD for all equations!

Make sure every sentence contributes to your report. Watch out for meaningless fluff!

The biggest mistake of technical writers is to not include enough graphs, pictures, and drawings in their documents. These figures are each worth many words. Use figures that are well labeled to provide information that would be hard to understand if only presented as text.

Make sure the figures have captions and that you refer to each figure in the text. Don't refer to them as graphs! Refer to them as Figures!

If you want to have text wrap around figures and tables, you can use frames or text boxes to keep the caption with the figure or table. The template document has information on using frames. Frames are better because the update field command will automatically update figure and table numbering inside frames, but doesn't work automatically inside text boxes. Use Words ability to automatically number captions and references to captions. (Insert - Reference - Caption to insert a caption. Insert - Reference - Cross-Reference to insert a reference to a figure or table)

Another trick to keep table captions with the table is to place tables captions in the top row of the table. Merge the cells in the top row. That way the table caption will always stay with the table!

Make sure your graphs meet the guidelines (see below)!

Graphs

Presenting data in an understandable format requires thought and attention to detail. Follow these guidelines when preparing lab reports and oral reports.

Use a white background for all graphs.
Most data will have both x and y values and thus should be presented using an xy scatter plot.
Label all axes and include units where appropriate.
Axis scale labels should be in the margin of the graph and not inside the graph border.
Eliminate parts of the range in both x and y axis that aren't used or that aren't meaningful.
Place a caption with a brief description below the graph. Add this caption in Word, not in your graphing software.
Use data symbols to show data points unless there is so much data that the symbols overlap. If the data symbols overlap it is better to connect the data points with a line and not show the data symbols.
When presenting multiple plots on a single graph make sure that it is easy to distinguish the plots using the legend. Legibility is especially important if you are printing your report in black and white or grayscale.
If curve fitting is used explain why and include the equation (either on the graph or elsewhere in the report).
If a model or theoretical curve is presented it should be a smooth curve without data points.
Use the same font in the graphs as you use in the text of the report.
Insert the graph in your report after the first reference to it in the text. Generally the graph can be inserted after the next paragraph break or it can be inserted so that the text wraps around the graph.
If you are using Microsoft Word, graphs from Microsoft Excel can be inserted as pictures using the "Paste Special" command. The picture format requires less memory than a spreadsheet link and will prevent the Microsoft Word document from becoming huge when large data sets are used to generate graphs.
Scale the size of the graph so it is large enough to see the data and read the text, but not so large that it takes up an entire page. Graphs can be scaled after insertion, but make sure the font size is appropriate.