We study the nature of potentials in scalar field based models for dark energy - with both canonical and noncanonical kinetic terms .
We calculate numerically , and using an analytic approximation around a \approx 1 , potentials for models with constant equation-of-state parameter , w _ { \phi } .
We find that for a wide range of models with canonical and noncanonical kinetic terms there is a simple approximation for the potential that holds when the scale factor is in the range 0.6 \lesssim a \lesssim 1.4 .
We discuss how this form of the potential can also be used to represent models with nonconstant w _ { \phi } and , hence , how it could be used in reconstruction from cosmological data .