Tips for writing a practical report

Quickly written by Mr. Werner Badenhorst, March 2012 1. Introduction Origin of or background to the experiment Where does the idea or need for this experiment come from? Relevance of the experiment Why do it? Whats the use of doing it? Content of the experiment What is the experiment about - briefly? Outcomes of the experiment What do you expect to see or get from the experiment? 2. Objectives a. Primary Objective(s) b. Secondary Objectives (which when achieved and added together will realise in the achievement of the primary objective(s) c. Motivation behind the objective why do you specifically want to measure / determine / test x, y and z? 3. Methodology a. List of equipment and material used. b. Detailed circuit diagram with a written description of the setup. c. Equipment settings (such as probe settings, scope settings, component values) d. Step-by-step experimental description i. Order of events. ii. What to measure and how/when to measure / record it. 4. Results a. Tabulated and graphical results clearly indicated at which step or part of the experiment the results were taken. The heading of the table or graph must clearly indicate what the data of graph is about, where and when it was measured. b. A brief description of the results that explains to the reader what he/she is looking at and perhaps pointing out one or two of important aspects to note. Basically an expansion of the heading. 5. Discussion Discuss the following (might be more, might be less) a. The important observations made from the results and the significance thereof. What should the reader focus on and why? The value of X gives an indication of the Therefore if the value is high, it means that which could lead to However if b. Results that correlate or differ from the expected with possible (realistic, engineering, theoretically sound, educated) reasons for differences. c. If there is a very good correlation between theory and practical results, what does that imply? d. Your discussions must be relevant to your objectives. 6. Conclusion The conclusions must link directly back to your objectives. - Objective A was to determine if Based on the observations made based on Table 3 and Fig 2 , it can therefore be concluded that indeed - Based on the discussion in section 5.2, it can be concluded that increasing causes a proportional, exponential decrease of This provides the answer to the question posed as part objective B.