LabWriteUp for Students

As many teachers and university tutors will tell you, a lot of student reports lose a significant portion of marks simply because they are not formatted appropriately, even though the content may be good. At the same time many students claim that the guidelines for writing a report are not always made clear.

Teaching students how to a write good report is not easy. They are often told to read a book on the subject or an online guide, to look at published journal articles, or even to read the APA manual itself. However, most students find out about issues of style after they have submitted their report, when they get their written feedback. So, they have already lost marks before they can begin to understand what is required.

LabWriteUp was written to correct this situation. Students can begin writing their reports in the correct format straight away. The application will guide you, the student, through the process of writing your reports from start to finish. Here are a list of some of the features of LabWriteUp:

• It creates a suitable title page, automatically, based on the information requested (author details, purpose of the report, the title, and the running head)

• It creates a running head (page header) and numbers pages automatically

• It helps you to identify the design of the study, such as dependent and independent variables, and creates a paragraph about your design automatically

• It suggests a title for your report

• It guides you through the method section of the report, from Participants, to Materials, to Procedure.

• It guides you through the presentation of your results, whether you have used a Wilcoxon test, t-test, ANOVA, Chi-square, or multiiple regression, and creates a paragraph of your results expressed appropriately.

• It creates graphs instantly. Just enter the means (and SDs) and you can see a plot of the data, with or without error bars.

• It also create tables of your data, instantly, and opens them in your word processor.

• It helps you write your introduction. It indicates what should be included in the introduction and in which order

• It helps you organise your discussion section. Most students may not realise the importance of this section. It is here where students can demonstrate their thinking skills in how they evaluate the experiment. LabWriteUp guides you on what issues to write about.

• It helps you organise the Abstract. It even creates one for you, based on the information you have entered in other sections. You can edit the suggested text. You can create a normal abstract (a single paragraph) or you can ask LabWriteUp to create a structured abstract.

• It helps you organise your references. Once you have entered the references in the database, you can insert a reference in the text and it will be added to the list automatically. The list will also be put in alphabetical order.

• Throughout the report, you can use abbreviations that LabWriteUp will convert when the report is built. For example, if your report contains words that are difficult to type and you expect to use them a lot, such as neurophysiological, individual, and so on, you create an abbreviation, such as ?neu and just type this in each time you want to type neurophysiological. Each instance of ?neu will then be replaced with the word neurophysiological.

• It also has a Link Word feature. Reports that use linking words and phrases, to emphasise, change the topic, counter agrue, and so on, read better and more coherently than reports that are merely a list of points. This feature contains a large collection of words and phrases that can be used to link ideas and link paragraphs. These are categorised by the type of point you wish to make. Simply cut-and-paste the selected word or phrase into your report.

• Once you have entered all of the information about the study and you have written up each section, you get LabWriteUp to build the report for you. It creates a first draft of your report that you can then edit. It will do a word count and you can then do an APA style check on the text. This APA style check will run through the report looking for stylistic issues and will offer ways to correct them.

• When you have finished the report, you can export the first draft to your favourite word processor, where you will see the report in its correctly formatted version. You can continue to add to the report from there.