You are writing a technical abstract for an experiment done in a lab. In this experiment, an aluminum can is recycled to form alum. The document should be 1.5 spaced. Be as concise as possible; long abstracts do not automatically mean better. Write everything in the past tense. Absolutely no first person. The most professional sounding writing is written entirely in the third person and without personal pronouns (i.e. ‘The solid was added’ vs. ‘We added the solid’). The abstract should be written using justified text.
A technical abstract, an abbreviated form of a scientific research paper, is a short 1-2 page summary of an experiment.
The abstract should be clearly divided into sections which we will describe below. Each section should have a header, much like this document. It does not matter if you bold, underline, or italicize the headers, just be consistent. The document should be no more than 4 pages total (figures and spacing included). Again, be concise and organized.
Title: The title should be descriptive of the content ??” do not call it “Experiment 2 Technical Abstract” or simply “The Chemistry of Recycling.” It should describe the major findings of the experiment.
Introduction: As an editorial note, this section should only be 3 or 4
sentences. The purpose of the introduction is to convey a quick what, why and how to the reader. Imagine you are being stopped in the hallway by a friend on their way to lab. They ask you “What are we doing in lab today?” and you only have about a minute to tell them. The introduction does not have to give any details, only a description of what you did and why you did it. You’ll notice that each experiment has an introduction that discusses reasons why we are studying a particular topic. If asked to write an introduction for experiment 1, one could write, “A topic of interest to many scientists is the investigation of the dangers involved in using nitrate-based fertilizers. While it is known that nitrate poisoning killed Bevo, the source of the poisoning is unknown and will be determined using two common nitrate testing methods: the nitrate test strip and the diphenylamine test.” Also notice, a brief description of the scientific reasoning for using these tests is mentioned.
****** See the resources i sent for more information on the lab
Materials and Methods: The major experimental steps are briefly summarized. The purpose of this section is to allow another student to exactly duplicate what you and your partner did in lab (not necessarily what the lab manual says you are to do) and should only be 1 or 2 paragraphs. Just like the rest of the technical abstract, this section should be written in your own words. This is probably the most commonly missed section of a technical abstract. There are several common mistakes made when writing this section. DO NOT write in the form of a numbered or bulleted list; it should be written in paragraph form in the past tense. Another common mistake is to copy the text from the lab manual and simply change a few words. This is not acceptable and is plagiarism. Another mistake is leaving out critical information such as masses and volumes of chemicals used (these are to be exact), as well as equipment used. The key to this section is to be concise, only report pertinent information. You may assume the reader knows as much chemistry and technique as a general chemistry student familiar with this lab, e.g. do not report steps such as how to weigh out solids, measure liquids, clean up and write observations. These do not need to be explained anywhere in the abstract.
******* See the resources i sent for more information on the lab.
Results: This is the most important section of the technical abstract and thus should be the longest. The
purpose of this section is to explain your data and the observations you made. The purpose of this section is to present the data you collected, the results you arrived at and how you arrived at them. You can think of this section as a written summary.You should discuss what type of reaction each step is (including the balanced equation) and defend your choice with your observations and any other information you used to make your determination. The more observations you write down in lab, the easier this will be. The last thing to discuss is your percent yield and why it deviates from 100% (i.e sources of error. If ‘human error’ is involved, name the specific errors that YOU experienced that would affect the yield).
**** See the resources i sent for more information on the lab
Conclusion:This section is a summary of the entire technical abstract and, like the introduction, will only be 2
to 4 sentences. In the conclusion, we would like you to restate the purpose of the experiment, state your final answer to that purpose and whether or not the experiment was successful Example “Using the diphenylamine and nitrate test strips on several source samples and comparing to solutions of known concentration, the source of Bevo’s poisoning was determined successfully. The findings suggest Bevo died from a contaminated…source because….”
There are faxes for this order.
