A progress report should not be written in the first person I or we. (Your name is on the report so it is obvious that you have done the work.) The progress report should not be written in a cookbook format or in a temporal tense. Do not write...
On Jan 4 at 3:00 twenty sheets of paper were first loaded into the scanner. A test document was next placed on the Visioneer PaperPort-3100 scanner and an image was recorded as a TIF file. My second test document could not be scanned because the dog ate it. The file of the scanned image was saved on a 3.5" floppy disk. I went home for the day. On Jan 5 at 10:00 AM Betty helped me transfer the file to Saturn over the internet. The file was next loaded into program CLEAN which removed white noise. The file was then transferred to my PC. I next displayed the image with Corel Photo Paint. The next day at 12:00 I had Sam, Jane, and Jim compare the image on my monitor to the original. I should have had 5 volunteers but Betty and Cindy had a test. Sam and Jane thought the original looked better. Jim and I thought the computer presentation looked better. I should have ten more observations by next week.
First, do not apologize. Second, it is not important that some task was performed on Jan 4, 5, or 6th; or at 3:00, 10:00, or 12:00; or that Betty helped with the transfer; or that Sam, Jane, and Jim were the observers, etc. Furthermore the only important points are...
A test document was scanned with a Visioneer PaperPort-3100 scanner. White noise was removed from the scanned image and it was compared to the original by three observers. Only one out of three observers felt the computer presentation looked better than the original.
Missing from the report is the technique used to remove white noise, a statement of the significance or implications of the results, and how the results relate to the hypothesis?