How to be a Successful Organic Chemist

35 in past tense, and other verb forms such as present tense, or imperative form, must be avoided. You should assume that the reader has an extensive chemistry background, and is reading your procedure in order to learn how to repeat the experiment (note: the procedural format used in the lab manual is far too detailed for this reader). A challenging part of the procedure is to omit unnecessary details and focus on the necessities, see below for specific examples. (2) Things to watch out for: Do not explain the reason for why anything is done in the procedure. That means that you might have added an acid to precipitate a product, but the reason for this action, is not appropriate. Furthermore, many actions that a chemist performs as part of an experiment should not be mentioned in the procedure. An example: before I can swirl a round bottom flask I must loosen the clamp, but the clamp adjustment should not be in the procedure because it follows logically. Likewise, I close the stop-cock on my separatory funnel before I pour materials into the funnel, but there is no need to mention this, or any of the other details on how I handled the funnel. A trained chemist will know how to handle a separatory funnel during a liquid-liquid extraction. (3) Some examples: Bad (explanations): Na 2 SO 4 was added because it is a drying agent and therefore removes water from the crude reaction mixture. Bad (wordy, imprecise): The distillation apparatus was assembled the way we have learned before and the reaction mixture was heated on a sand bath on a jack and the sand bath was set to approximately 350 ° C. When I heated the mixture, it turned milky white, like a beautiful pearl that had been ground up and it smelled gross. I got a fraction boiling at 95-98 ° C that I think was the product but I’m not sure. Good: Acetic acid (1 mL) and ethanol (1 mL) were mixed in a round bottom flask and heated to reflux. Good: The reaction mixture was gravity filtered and the solvent removed using rotary evaporation. 6.4 The What: What were the major findings of the experiment? Section 5. Data (1) General: Data that you collect must be presented clearly. In almost all cases, a tabulated form is required. The data that you should present is intimately tied to the purpose of the experiment. If the purpose is to synthesize a compound, the data are related to that purpose, i.e. they indicate whether or not the synthesis was successful. Tables should be numbered and have captions. Units should be given in the title cells, in parentheses or brackets. Most likely, the data will be analytical and spectroscopic data. Examples are: • TLC-analysis (spots, distance travelled, R f -values), • Melting point data (melting point ranges, literature values) • IR-spectroscopy data (functional groups, wavenumber, literature values) • Synthesis data (only appropriate when a chemical synthesis has been performed): masses, volumes (if appli- cable), densities (if applicable), moles, yields • NMR data (assignment, shift values, integrals) In each table, the most important data should be presented. The task is to filter out the important data points. For example, when providing a table with IR data, you can readily find many peaks, but most of them are irrelevant to the purpose of an experiment or do not provide any information about the success of the experiment