Teaching Varied Technical Writing Styles in the Upper Division Laboratory John Olmsted Ill California State University, Fullerton, Fullerton, CA 92634
I t has long heen recognized, among both academic and industrial chemists, that the ability to communicate effectively is one of the most important skills-if not the single most important skill-that successful chemists need to possess. In the typical undergraduate curriculum, development of this skill is addressed on the one hand through courses in English composition, perhaps augmented by an offering in technical writing, and on the other by a heavy emphasis on lahoratory report writing throughout the chemistry curriculum. Still, one hears all too frequently the complaint that undergraduates in science are wanting in effective communication skills. The persistence of this problem is due a t least in part to the focus of communications exercises in the courses which undergraduates take. On the part of English departments, attention is seldom if ever given to the effective communication of scientific material. On the part of chemistry departments, the tradition has heen to em~hasizecommunication in the form of the scientific journals. The lahoratory report, from preliminary chemistry through the advanced laboratories, is organized in the standard order of Introduction/Theory, Procedure, Results/Calculations, and Discussion. Neither of these approaches directly addresses the most important communications skill which the effective ~racticinechemist needs: the ability to explain scientific matkrial adequately to a varietv of different audiences. for a varietv of different purposes. One stratew to aoolv to this shortcomine would be the development;f a ie&&te course in effectivescientific communication. Courses in technical writing exemplify this strategy. There are several drawbacks to this approach: it adds more units to an alreadv - hiehlv " .crowded curriculum, it treats scientific coinmunication as if it were independent of the ~ r a c t i c eof science, and it -aenerallv. requires a costlv teamteaching approach: At California State Universitv. Fullerton, we have chosen to follow a different strategy, in which we use the experiments done by the students in an advanced undergraduate laboratory course as the subjects for reports done in a variety of different styles. The course in which this strategy is employed is our last required laboratory course, which ensures that students embarking on this exercise have already been drilled extensively on wrzing standard lahoratory reports. In our curriculum, this course is the second semester of a two-semester sequence titled Integrated Laboratory. The first semester of this sequence is heavily analytical in emphasis, while the second is heavily physical. The course has analytical, organic, and physical chemistry prerequisites and is quite similar t o the physical chemistry laboratory course taught in the majority of undergraduate programs. The integration to which the course title alludes has come increasingly to denote an integration of fundamental concepts in theoretical chemistry with actual chemical experiments, and the successful expression of these ideas in appropriate written or oral form. The exoerimental substance of this course is aseauence of eight experiments, each of one week's duration, foliowed by individual student projects lasting for four weeks. The first week of the course is devoted to design of an appropriate nrocedure for the first exoeriment. and the last week is used ;or oral reports on the stuhent ~rojects.The specified exper798
Journal of Chemical Education
iments all are variations on exoeriments described in standard experimental physical chemistry lahoratory texts such as Shoemaker et al.' or Daniels et aL.2 while the nroiecta can be . un any suhject having a physicallannlytical/inorxanic emuhasis (svnthesis is rxrluded).'l'he eirht set exnerimentsare done by pairs in rotation, with no twb pairs doing the same experiment at the same time. The Reports The reports which are rewired in coniunction with this experime&al work are twelvein all, eight associated with the set experiments and four with the ~roiects. Thev are the fol. " lowing: Experimental Reports 1) Detailed Procedure 2) Detailed Discussion 3) Technical Report 4) Detailed (Two-Page)Abstract 5) Popular Science Report 6) Short (One-Paragraph)Abstract 7) Research Proposal 8) Journal Article Project Reports 9) Proposed Procedure 10) Annotated Bibliography 11) Oral Report 12) Final (Journal-Style)Report In each of these reports, the students are expected to present their experimental findings and understanding of the concepts in a manner that is consistent with the type of report. 1) Detailed Procedure. Because all of the set experiments are modified from textbook descriptions, "cookbook" procedures are not readily available. Each pair of students spends the first week of the course designing and testing an appropriate procedure in instruction-manual form, knowing that their audience is the other students in the class who will suhsequently be doing that experiment. These procedural instructions are instructor-edited and distributed to the other students as they come to do the experiment. This approarh serves several p6dagogical purposes. The students must grapple with experimcmt design, which has not previously been of concern tothem since most prior experimental work has been precisely described. Having done some design, they must then communicate to an audience of their peers how that design should be effectively carried out. As other students rotate in to do the exneriment.. thev.become critics of the procedure and are encokraged to suggest clarifications and modifications. a task which thev are inclined to take more seriously knowing that they a r e dealing with a student-generated, as opposed to an "expert," instructorgenerated, procedure. 2) Detailed Discussion. The sine qua non for communi~~
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' Shoemaker. D P., Garland. C. W., Steinfeld.J. I., and Nibler, J W., "Experiments in Phystcal Chemistry" 4th ed McG-awHill. New York. 198q. ... ..
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Daniels, F.. Williams. J. W., Bender. P., Alberty. R. A,, Cornwell, C. D.. and Harriman. J. E., Experimental Physical Chemistry," 7th ed., McGraw-Hill. New York, 1970.
rating scientific results well is a sound grnsp of the significimc,e and reliability o i those rrsults. Despite continual emphasis on insightful disruss~onsof resdts in all lahorarurv work. wc, find th;?t students still have a poorly defined understanding of what constitutes a good discussion. For this reason, student attention is focused exclusively on the discussion in this second report. In this report, students are expected to accomplish two things: to show how the results are meaningful and significant by relating them to the larger body of chemical knowledge and theory, and to assess how accurate and reliable their results are by appropriately analyzing the method used for possible sources of error and their magnitudes. 3) Technical R e ~ o r t .The industrial chemist works in a milieu in which h i s h her most likrly rommunication will he some form of technical report. For this reoort. the students are asked to imagine that they have carried out the experiment a t the request of their work su~ervisor.to whom thev must now addrks a technical report describing concisely theiheory and method, aivinc sufficient details of the results and CHIculations to conve;the important features of the results, and recommending further work or termination of the "oroiect" . , hased on the significance of their results. Efficiency 1s ot the essence in this report: the imoortance of the work should he described fully ykt without &king more of the supervisor's time than necessary, and the economic henefit of continuing or terminating the work should be clearly stated. 4) Detailed Abstract. As scientific conferences have proliferated and their proceedings have more and more frequently been published in the form of expanded abstracts, this form of communication has become increasingly common. Writing such a concise yet self-contained report requires particularly good organization and a sense of what is essential and what is oerioheral. The skills used in oreoarine a detailed abstract are also those needed in writingotder shirt technical pieces, such as an interoffice memorandum descrihine a new *nroiect " or result. 5 ) P o ~ u l aScience r R e ~ o r tIn . this reoort. students are asked to describe their experiment in journalistic style to an imagined audience of interested laypersons such as entering freshman science majors. Students are referred to science news magazines such as Discover for examples of appropriate style and level of presentation. This assignment presents two major challenges: to explain the experiment in non-technical yet clear terms and to convince the audience of the importance and excitement of the results. Since the experiments are all replicas of classic work in physical chemistry, the latter is a formidable task, in which the students are encouraged to exercise some degree of poetic license. They are told, For example, that they may wish to write as though reporting at the time when the experiment would have been a new discovery. In this context, an iodine absorption spectrum may become a test of quantum theory. 6) Short Abstract. The short abstract is of course a timehonored tradition in the scientific literature. Students are urged to consult the current research literature for examples of this form and to prepare an abstract of their experiment which would be suitable for Chemical Abstracts. 7 ) Research Prooosal. For manv a scientist. convincine others that resources should bedrvotrd tostndying whatever interests that scirntist is ancsjential Dart of his or her iob. The students are asked to try their hands a t this endeavor, using their exueriment as ureliminarv results warrantine further funding and building a research proposal around extending the work. As with the nooular science reoort, a certain flieht of imagination is encouraged. Students are allowed to make the assumption that extended work on the experiment has not previously been done, and they may also indulge in somewhat exaggerated claims concerning the significance of further work. For those who have difficulty structuring this kind of report, examples of successful research proposals from among our faculty are made available. ~~~
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8) Journal Article. For their last report on the set experiments, the students return to familiar ground and oreoare a . . full laboratory report in standard journal furmat. 9) Propo,wd Pr'rort~ilureAs the students embark on their projects they are required todesign the experimental work in consultatim with the instructor. As Dart of that design, thev are required to prepare a brief written description of thee;. periments they expect to carry out. This exercise combines some of the elements of the first (detailed procedure) and seventh (research orooosal) reoorts, but with a different emphasis in that they are describing work that will actually be carrird out hv them. This report and the hblioara~~hy which follows areintended not onl; as exercises in writi&but also as an integral part of the preparation of the project. 10) Annotated Bibliography. To familiarize the students with the literature relevant to their projects, to give them some practice in literature searching using the standard techniques, and to acquaint them with the communication of the results of such a search, they are required to prepare an annotated bibliography of literature references that are relevant to their projects.-The annotation is expected to he a one-sentence summary of the subject of the reference as it relates t o their project. In this way the bibliography becomes an assignment in writing as well as a list of references, and the request to relate the annotation to the oroiect serves both to focus the student's attention on those'reierences which will he helpful in oreoarine the oroiect reoort and to encouraee the student to'write oFiginai ainotahons rather than Eopying from Chemical Abstracts. The hiblioeraohies are not exoected to he exhaustive; rather students &e requested to inciude only the 10-20 most useful references. 11) Oral Report. Scientists, of course, need to he able t o communicate effectivelv in soeech as well as in orint. As an introduction to the orai presentation of results in a mode similar to a seminar. readine of a oaoer. - . . or a technical erouo meeting, each student is asied to present his or her project results as a 20-minute oral reoort to the entire class. In that oral report, the student is expkcted to outline the theory, describe the essence of the method and orocedures. eive the important results, and indicate their significance. ~ k class e as audience receives the henefit of learning from both the strong and the weak points of each presentation. The oral reports, being on individual projects, also provide all of the students with knowledge of the project results of all their classmates. Primarily, however, the oral reports allow each student to develop his or her skills of oral presentation before a relatively congenial audience of peers. 12) Final Report. The project culminates in a full written report in journal style. Since each project is an original student effort, this final report is expected to express the student's individual thinking, especially in the procedure and discussion sections.
Crltique The approach to report writing described here is not without its shortcomings. One significant disadvantage is that several of the types of reports are not particularly well-suited to the full presentation and analysis of the experimental results. To minimize this problem, we ask students to submit an anoendix to those reoorts for which it is aonrooriate. in w h i s t h e data analysis & presented and the significance and reliability of the results is discussed. A second difficulty, for which a ready solution has not heen found, is that since only one report of each type is required, students have no opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned from their first attempts at writing these different types of reports. Requiring a second report of each type, with sufficient time between them to allow eradine and return of the first report, would give this oppo&nityuhut would necessitate either requiring an excessive number of reports or reducing significantly the range of report types. .A
Volume 61 Number 9 September 1984
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The success of the strategy described in this article is difficult to assess quantitatively. Our goal is to improve the ability of our students to communicate effectively in a variety of styles without sacrificing the traditional goals of imparting an understanding of experimental chemistry and an ability to analyze critically experiments and results. One can try to assess success by instructor perceptions of student achievement, by student evaluations of their experience, and by employer reactions t o our graduates. On the last of these we have no data a t present, but we have two years of feedback from students and instructor. Judging from instructor perceptions, the strategy seems to he succeeding. Although many students have difficulty in adapting to variable report formats a t the outset, almost all are equal to the challenge and find it easier to cope with the later reports. The quality of writing in most cases shows significant improvement over the course of the semester, and many students produce examples of excellent writing. As far as the students themselves are concerned, the evaluations have so far been generally positive. As mentioned
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Journal of Chemical Education
above, sonie students object to not having an opportunity to demonstrate that they have learned from their mistakes by writing a second report in the same format. A lareer number of students, however, rumment favorably on t h i rhallenge posed by the varied formats. Some students find the holistic approach to report grading which the varied format necessitates to he somewhat arhitrarv, hut the maioritv " " find the grading and course requirements to be quite reasonable. Students' responses indicate that the stratem of reauirine . " varied types of reports is effective in training chemistry majors to communicate better. The course described here must he seen in perspective as only part of the overall requirements related to communications skills for chemistry majors a t Fullerton, which also include two courses in English composition, an upper division competency examination in writing skills (state mandated), extensive laboratury report requirements in all lab courses, and an undergraduate research requirement involving a detailed written research report. We brlieve the stracegy which has been described here plays a significant role as a key ingredient in this total package.
