Each spring semester I take on the task of teaching and grading full lab reports for my senior advanced inorganic chemistry class. For most this is their first experience writing a document of this magnitude as most other labs they have previously taken require either lab report sheets or the occasional abbreviated lab memo. As I read their lab reports each year I am reminded both how challenging it is to teach writing (more specifically scientific writing) and to grade the reports objectively. See for instance the Nature Chemistry thesis article:  http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1038/nchem.1985.

This year I stumbled across a great website for lab report writing. The link below is to a lab-writing website that was designed at North Carolina State University under an NSF grant. It includes a plethora of information that range from flow charts for students as they construct their lab report (with each section hyperlinked to definitions/bullets of what should be included), to differences in types of data plotting, to downloadable/editable grading rubrics for faculty. This is an impressive website and you can easily spend a lot time perusing the amount of information that has been made available.