For a formal report you will provide your laboratory summary in a standard ACS journal format. If you are unfamiliar with this style please consult the ACS style guide available in the library.  Your may also consult the American Chemical Society web site.  Your report should contain approximately four to five pages of text. All figures, tables, structures and any mechanisms must be done using a chemical drawing program. Figures, tables, structures, mechanisms etc., are not included in the four to five pages of text.   Divide your report into sections as follows:

The report MUST be written in third person passive voice.  Passive voice means no I, our, me, we, us, my etc.  You did not prepare a solution; the solution was prepared.  Also when discussing the experiment do not use future tense as was used in your prelaboratory, present tense should also be avoided except in the introduction discussing relevant theory.  Instead of stating the data will be collected, you should state the data was collected.

Abstract
Introduction
Materials and methods
Results
Discussion
Conclusion
Please utilize current ACS journals as a model for the type of report submitted.

The abstract should be a short summary of the entire project. This should include significant results as well as a general description. In the abstract you are trying to entice a reader to read the entire paper to get more detail.  You should give away the results in an abstract.  It is not a movie preview; it is a summary.

As for the brief report, the introduction in a formal report should indicate the relevance of and theory behind the work. The introduction should be brief and include background information concerning your experiment, not irrelevant wholly general information. In addition, it is helpful to briefly relate your work to the work of others or indicate its relevance to the field of science. General mechanisms and information can be included in the introduction if these mechanisms. Information included here should include theoretical expectations. You should discuss in the introduction what results are expected from your experiment whether those results were obtained or not.  A discussion of unexpected results should be included in the discussion section.

The materials and methods section should include your laboratory procedure. This should be provided in the same general format you have noticed in journal articles. You do not need to show all calculations nor do you need to detail all parts of your procedure. Review a few articles from an ACS journal like the JOC or Biochemistry to get an idea of the contents of the materials and methods section. Preface each paragraph of the materials and methods section with the official IUPAC name of  each product/result as shown in literature. Your materials and methods section will be brief. Report any relevant physical data of each product in paragraph form as seen in ACS journals as appropriate. Report any spectroscopic data available in this format as well.

Your results section should contain the results of your experiment. Herein you should report any yields, provide summary of any spectra, and any other relevant data. Representation of data in tabular or graphical form is preferred to paragraph discussion or lists in text.  In general, the results section does not contain comment. The discussion of your results is included in the next section, the discussion section. Inclusion of data in tabular form is acceptable in this section as well as in the discussion section. Label your tables and figures using table 1 or figure 1 nomenclature. Provide appropriate detailed figure captions.  Refer to your tables or figures using the table/figure nomenclature within the text. You may also label structures with difficult or large names numerically and refer to them as compound 1, etc.

The discussion section should include a brief description of successful and unsuccessful efforts. It should also illuminate why certain methods were chosen rather than other methods which might accomplish the same task. The discussion section is where you postulate about what went wrong or right and also what you would change if the experiment were repeated. Do not include trivial details or "opinion" like "this experiment was too difficult".  The discussion section is also an appropriate place to include alternate explanations, pathways or mechanisms especially if they pertain to explanation of unexpected results. It is especially important to relate the results actually obtained and presented in the results section to the theoretical information presented in the introduction.

Your conclusion should be rather brief and need not be separated into a separate section. Most information should be included in the discussion section. Your conclusion is simply summing up data and its implications article in a few (2-4) sentences.  This can be separated from the discussion or used as a concluding paragraph for the discussion.

It will be difficult to keep the report to the four  to five pages of text. One goal is to determine how to accurately and succinctly present your results. You will be unable to re-state the same information a dozen times. Therefore, it is important that you present the material clearly the first time.

All information including structures, tables, graphs and labeling of spectra must be done on a computer typewriter or word processor of some type.