  Writing is an integral part of the process of science. In the undergraduate
physics curriculum, the most common place that students engage with scientific
writing is in lab classes, typically through lab notebooks, reports, and
proposals. There has not been much research on why and how we include writing
in physics lab classes, and instructors may incorporate writing for a variety
of reasons. Through a broader study of multiweek projects in advanced lab
classes, we have developed a framework for thinking about and understanding the
role of writing in lab classes. This framework defines and describes the
breadth of goals for incorporating writing in lab classes, and is a tool we can
use to begin to understand why, and subsequently how, we teach scientific
writing in physics.
