From: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Writing a Methods Section
Text inspired by the Writing Center at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
How do I write a strong Methods section?
A Methods section of a scientific paper describes, in detail, how you tested the hypothesis you
developed and also explains the rationale for your procedure. You want your experiment to
reproducible so that other researchers can conduct the same study to verify your results. The only
way they can do that is if you explain exactly what you did.
Here’s a real-world example of the importance of reproducibility. In 1989, physicists Stanley
Pons and Martin Fleischman announced that they had discovered “cold fusion,” a way of
producing excess heat and power without the nuclear radiation that accompanies “hot fusion.”
Such a discovery could have great ramifications for the industrial production of energy, so these
findings created a great deal of interest. When other scientists tried to duplicate the experiment,
however, they didn’t achieve the same results, and as a result many wrote off the conclusions as
unjustified (or worse, a hoax). To this day, the viability of cold fusion is debated within the
scientific community, even though an increasing number of researchers believe it possible. So
when you write your Methods section, keep in mind that you need to describe your experiment
well enough to allow others to replicate it exactly.
With these goals in mind, let’s consider how to write an effective Methods section in terms of
content, structure, and style.
Content
Sometimes the hardest thing about writing this section isn’t what you should talk about, but what
you shouldn’t talk about. Writers often want to include the results of their experiment, because
they measured and recorded the results during the course of the experiment. But such data should
be reserved for the Results section. In the Methods section, you can write that you recorded the
results, or how you recorded the results (e.g., in a table), but you shouldn’t write what the results
were—not yet. Here, you’re merely stating exactly how you went about testing your hypothesis.
How much detail? Be precise in providing details, but stay relevant. Ask yourself,
“Would it make any difference if this piece were a different size or made from a different
material?” If not, you probably don’t need to get too specific. If so, you should give as
many details as necessary to prevent this experiment from going awry if someone else
tries to carry it out. Probably the most crucial detail is measurement; you should always
quantify anything you can, such as time elapsed, temperature, mass, volume, etc.
From: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Rationale: Be sure that as you’re relating your actions during the experiment, you explain
your rationale for the protocol you developed. If you capped a test tube immediately after
adding a solute to a solvent, why did you do that? (That’s really two questions: why did
you cap it, and why did you cap it immediately?) In a professional setting, writers
provide their rationale as a way to explain their thinking to potential critics.
Structure and style
Organization is especially important in the Methods section of a lab report because readers must
understand your experimental procedure completely. Many writers are surprised by the difficulty
of conveying what they did during the experiment, since after all they’re only reporting an event,
but it’s often tricky to present this information in a coherent way. There’s a fairly standard
structure you can use to guide you, and following the conventions for style can help clarify your
points.
Narrative structure: Think of this section as telling a story about a group of people and
the experiment they performed. Describe what you did in the order in which you did it.
You may have heard the old joke centered on the line, “Disconnect the red wire, but only
after disconnecting the green wire,” where the person reading the directions blows
everything to kingdom come because the directions weren’t in order. We’re used to
reading about events chronologically, and so your readers will generally understand what
you did if you present that information in the same way. Also, since the Methods section
does generally appear as a narrative (story), you want to avoid the “recipe” approach:
“First, take a clean, dry 100 ml test tube from the rack. Next, add 50 ml of distilled
water.” You should be reporting what did happen, not telling the reader how to perform
the experiment: “50 ml of distilled water was poured into a clean, dry 100 ml test tube.”
Past tense: Remember that you’re describing what happened, so you should use past tense
to refer to everything you did during the experiment. Writers are often tempted to use the
imperative (“Add 5 g of the solid to the solution”) because that’s how some lab manuals
are worded; less frequently, they use present tense (“5 g of the solid are added to the
solution”). Instead, remember that you’re talking about an event which happened at a
particular time in the past, and which has already ended by the time you start writing, so
simple past tense will be appropriate in this section (“5 g of the solid were added to the
solution” or “We added 5 g of the solid to the solution”).
Passive voice vs. first person: In the past, scientific journals encouraged their writers to
avoid using the first person (“I” or “we”), because the researchers themselves weren’t
personally important to the procedure in the experiment. Remember that other researchers
should ideally be able to reproduce experiments exactly, based on the lab report; using
first person indicates (to some readers) that the experiment cannot be duplicated without
the original researchers present. To help keep personal references out of lab reports,
scientific conventions also dictated that researchers should use passive voice, in which
From: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
the subject of a sentence or clause doesn’t perform the action described by the verb.
These examples might explain the distinction between active and passive voice:
Active: We heated the solution to 80°C. (The subject, “we,” performs the action,
heating.)
Passive: The solution was heated to 80°C. (The subject, “solution,” doesn’t do the
heating–it is acted upon, not acting.)
Increasingly, especially in the social sciences, using first person and active voice is acceptable in
scientific reports. Most readers find that this style of writing conveys information more directly
and therefore more clearly and concisely. Since the scientific community commonly uses passive
voice, that is how we will write our formal writing in our class.