A bound notebook, used in ink, in order, without pages torn out. That combination is what makes it a record rather than a collection of notes.
Every entry starts with
Date · Investigation title · Group members
And then a safety section, before anything else
Two lines, ruled off at the top of the entry, written before you touch equipment:
Hazards: what could go wrong here
Response: what I would do about it, and where the thing I need is
Read the investigation page and the pictograms on the containers to fill it in. Guessing shows.
This is the one part of the notebook I mark — it is the seventh row of Lab Reports, and it is marked because knowing a hazard before you meet it is written into this course as something you have to be able to do.
While working
- Write readings as they happen, not from memory afterwards
- Mistake? One line through it, initial, keep going. Never scribble out
- Record the unexpected — the smell, the odd bubble, the reading that made no sense
- Sketch the setup. A rough sketch beats a paragraph
Why ink and why bound
Because a lab notebook is evidence. In research and in industry, notebooks settle patent disputes and safety investigations. The habits are the same at every level: contemporaneous, unaltered, honest.
What a good one looks like
Not neatness. Completeness and honesty — including the trial that failed and what you did next.
Apart from the safety section, the notebook is not marked. What it does is make the seven marked Lab Reports possible: everything you write while the work is happening is what you have to write from afterwards, and the criterion about naming your limits honestly is more or less impossible without it.