In this presentation I describe efforts towards transitioning second year students at a liberal arts college from writing short, informal lab write-ups to writing Journal of Organic Chemistry style lab reports over the course of one academic year.  My primary emphasis is focused on building students' rhetorical skills so that they can become competent scientific writers.  This is an important skill for our students because most of our graduates of this course become scientists and/or medical professionals.  My approach to this goal is to provide the students with examples of scientific writing on their experiments so that they can learn the proper conventions, style and content, detailed rubrics so they know what I expect from them, and specific feedback on their graded and returned reports.

Stepwise approach to writing lab reports in the organic chemistry course sequence

246th National Meeting (2013)

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