Engineering Lab Reports

A sizable component of your engineering and academic career will be acquiring data and presenting your work.  There are many ways to present your work: laboratory reports, memos, executive summaries, professional letters, posters, and presentation formats.  Perfecting your business and engineering writing styles takes practice and matures over time.  Many times the documents that you produce may become legal documents, subject to future scrutiny should a problem arise.

Be sure to conduct your own search to locate good sources for writing examples.  I've included a few to get you started.

Here is a great source for writing laboratory reports, where the major sections are discussed: Abstract, Introduction, Procedures, Results and Discussion, Conclusions, and Appendices:
http://www.writing.engr.psu.edu/workbooks/laboratory.html

When writing business memos, always avoid the use of first person, casual tone and opinion.  You just need present the important data keeping in mind the purpose, details, limitations, and implications of your work.

For example: We took a tour of the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge and it was so fun to get hands-on experience and measure the strain gage distance for ourselves.

A better way to state the same activities: A site tour of the Tacony-Palymyra Bridge was conducted and field measurements were recorded to determine the strain gage distance.

Here is a great source for writing business memos:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/590/04/

You can always get help here at Drexel by utilizing the Writing Center:
http://drexel.edu/engphil/about/DrexelWritingCenter/
http://drexel.edu/engphil/about/DrexelWritingCenter/workshops/

They also have various workshops you may register for during the various terms:
http://drexel.edu/engphil/about/DrexelWritingCenter/workshops/