English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

I spent most of this week working on inserting revisions and suggestions from the instructors and the rest of the group into our rough draft of the white paper.

Rough draft attached.

It was nice to see our project come together without any giant problems this week.

I spent most of my time this week working on the layout of our white paper draft. I wrote the introduction, designed the cover page quickly using images from our report, and then created a table of contents. After formatting my own section of the draft (the introduction), I began integrating the pieces that Joe, Pat and Shane had e-mailed to me.

This week was extremely productive for our group. We continued to research our individual pieces of the white paper draft, and worked on completing our research blogs. We shared some useful sources via e-mail while we worked.

In addition, we each created our own thumbnail for the design of the white paper. Interestingly, three out of the four of us chose some shade of blue to use as the main color in our thumbnail.

This week was a big week on our project. I designed a thumbnail for our group, which was frustrating for me, because I struggle with formatting in Microsoft Word. I hate that the lines never go where I want them to go, and usually just use InDesign, but I wanted to stay in Word since I knew it was probable that my group members wouldn't necessarily have this program at their disposal. In the end, we chose to use InDesign, and did incorporate a few elements of my thumbnail into our final version.

In this last blog, I wanted to cover security protocols and also get some general statistic information about wireless users for our introduction. I thought this information might be helpful to establish why a salesperson might want to know about these different routers.

In this blog, I wanted to look specifically at the firewall features for a router. The routers we’re comparing support several different kinds of firewall features, so I wanted to be sure we had information on the differences of each of them for the introduction.

• Network Address Translation (NAT)

For my second research blog, I want to look at the first few criteria we’ll be evaluating each router on and get a better understanding of the different ratings for each criterion.

Some of the criteria (price, size/weight/style and warranty information) don’t require much research to understand the different ratings. For example, the size, weight and style of a router don’t need to be researched from a difference standpoint. The sizes are relative among the routers, and the weight is either more or less than another router. These are personal preferences of each customer.

For my first research blog, I wanted to look at a few different articles and try to identify the main specifications (and the different levels of these specifications) that are important to look at when comparing routers. All of this research will be useful in crafting the introduction.