Joe Schall, Giles Writer in Residence for the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, has very generously contributed guidelines for writing papers and essays, lab or technical reports, reporting your internship experience and other papers. These guidelines are all available for your reference.

Hello! I teach and work with students in the Earth and Mineral Sciences Writing Center. In the process of doing this, I wrote a text to help students with their writing, Style for students: Effective technical writing in the information age. There are a couple of sections from this text that I know students have found very helpful. One is the section that focuses on writing essays and term papers. The other is the section that discusses writing Lab or Technical Reports. As you will find out, writing a technical report or a lab report is a much more structured task than writing an essay or term paper. The guidelines will show you what I mean. I hope that you find these helpful!

These sections have been adapted for the web below. Be sure to print out a copy of both for future reference. Enjoy!"

Essays & Term Paper Guidelines

General Considerations When you are first faced with the task of writing a long essay or term paper it can be intimidating, but you make your job and the reader's job easier by following the general advice that you will find in the guidelines. Print out a copy and keep it handy as you work on your paper.

Of course, if your professors offer you any specific guidelines about paper writing be sure to follow them first. Otherwise, incorporate the advice that follows into your papers wherever appropriate.

Lab or Technical Report Guidelines

General Considerations Particularly for those of you in engineering fields, you might find the reading of journal articles none too stimulating (other than the occasional exciting references to hot presses, cool gels, quickened pulses, or body melds). Nevertheless, at their best, the journal articles you must read are certainly important and carefully crafted. The rigid-seeming format and objective style of scientific reports lend them a universal utility so that readers from various disciplines can readily access and use the complex information. Your professors will confirm that busy scientists (who can sometimes be characterized as "reader-hostile") rarely read these reports linearly-many readers cut right to "Results and Discussion" or look over the tables and figures before reading anything, then jump around to those bits of the report that are most relevant to their particular needs. Often, their goals are to rapidly exclude information they do not want (or do not trust).

In light of the above realities, it is especially important for you to write reports in a fashion acceptable to a journal in your field. As you prepare technical reports for your writing-intensive courses, you have built-in slots in which to put your information, and you plug in to a tried and proven recipe that has evolved over many years. Understanding this recipe and conforming to it will help you to organize your complex information as well as meet your reader's specific and sophisticated needs.

Apply these guidelines as you prepare lab reports for your classes.

This web page is adapted from Joe Schall's book, Style for Students, Effective Technical Writing in the Information Age, © 2002 by Joe Schall, used here with the author's permission. The original book is available from Outernet Publishing at 800-328-1452.