• Vagueness: All language should be precise. Avoid words like "sort of" and "approximately".
• Nonscientific conclusions: You should include precisely worded scientific conclusions. For example: "I found the mass of an electron to be 0.532 ± 0.019 MeV/c2." Do not include opinions such as, "This lab was difficult" or "This lab was great!" Do not include personal statements such as "I learned about the Hall effect."
• Blaming the equipment: As a student in this class, your task is to produce the best measurement possible given the equipment available to you. Any limitations of equipment should be treated scientifically, as terms in your uncertainty calculation. Do not use any section of your lab report to vent or complain.
• Grammatical errors: You are expected to learn how to write professional, scientific lab reports. Proper language use is a critical aspect of this.
• Second-person writing: Do not write the procedure as a list of commands. Remember that you are writing a report, not a manual. This should be a past-tense, first-person narrative of what you did.
• Excessive computer generated output: Software such as Excel can easily perform a repetitive calculation on a large set of data and then report all of the individual steps for each data point. This is useless and will render your lab report unreadable. You should, instead, give a detailed explanation of the basic calculation(s) for a single data point, and then give the result(s) in a concise table form.

Note: This guide was adapted from Temple University's PHYS 2796 guide (2024).