If you're like most students, by the time you graduated high school you had written dozens of essays, short stories, and even poems. But many students have never been asked to perform technical writing. This is a different style of writing that is used very often in the sciences, engineering, and other technical fields. Although technical writing is similar to other types of writing you have done, there are some very important differences, which you will learn about as you work through the following pages.
Technical writing is used to generate many different kinds of written products, such as textbooks, magazine articles, and computer manuals. The goal of this module is to acquaint you with one specific type of technical writing: the lab report. Most science courses require you to write at least one lab report during the semester. By the end of this module, you will have a more thorough understanding of the style of writing required by lab reports, the parts of a typical lab report, how to use graphs and tables to illustrate your data, and how to properly cite the sources you used in your research.