English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

With respect to the core of the assignment, the white paper is solid: you have outlined a clear problem and discussed two reasonable solutions in an unbiased fashion with some attempt to compare them across a common rubric. The introduction is solid as is the design and construction of the document. This is a strong draft indeed. There is, however, room for improvement in both content and design.

As you revise the white paper, pay attention to the following elements:

• Provide a more robust executive summary. The executive summary (which is distinct from the introduction) summarizes the entire white paper. In other words, the executive summary gives away the "ending" of this white paper, summarizing any and all of its key conclusions/points of comparison.
• Avoid unnecessary jargon. While on the whole the document does a good job of describing the technology and defining key terms for the primary audience, there are spots (in first bit of text, for instance) that might "scare off" this audience. The language throughout needs to reflect the primary audience.
• Allow for multiple ways of reading white papers. While the body text is solid, and you do provide the occasional callout, there need to be more elements (e.g., bullet lists, captions for images, and tables that compare features) that account for the fact that white papers are rarely read all the way through. The white paper needs to account for the many readers who raid them and skim them.
• Create a more balanced perspective. At times, this reads more like a marketing white paper for OSS. I know that you have attempted to be fair (and that shows-up here), but at several key points there is some slippage. For instance, on page three in the "Up Front Costs" section you have a concluding paragraph that addresses the draw backs of OSS. However, that paragraph, compared to the previous one, is rather underdeveloped. Spending more time on the limits of one approach than the other suggests a bias (even if there isn't one). Expanding this paragraph so that it is balanced relative to the one before it (and doing this throughout the white paper) is how you can avoid this problem of bias.

Other minor (though important issues):

• Make sure you include a bibliography. That is kind of a big deal.
• Avoid second person in professional documents such as this.
• Revise the text for concision.
• Read text out loud to catch awkward and/or confusion sentence constructions and phrasing.

With these revision, your white paper will be in much better shape.