English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

This week’s reading covered ethics. Early on in the reading, ethics were defined by the phrase “doing the right thing”. This covers the basics of ethics but later on in the reading, ethics are broken up into three types: personal, social and conversation. Out of all the types of ethics, it seems as though that social ethics will have the greatest impact on my career. Especially since I hope to be involved the security sector of IT, many of the publications released are considered too controversial because they often put some users at risk.

The following is my individual report of work from April 6 through April 12.

Date: April 10, 2009
To: Professor Rivers
From: Group 2
Subject: Group 2 Activity Report – Week 13

This week’s reading in the Thompson Handbook covered the importance of research and gave several strategies for doing it effectively. The reading covering the Gantt charts also provided insight into Gantt charts and how to go about creating them.

The following is my individual report of work from March 30through April 5.

This week our group has accomplished several tasks related to our white paper project. The greatest accomplishment was setting up a means for communication. We have decided that the best way to communicate with each other is via email. To do this, we have been sending out group emails so that everyone is aware of what is going on. Ultimately we feel that this will prove effective throughout the course of this project.

This week’s reading served as an introduction to white papers. This makes perfect sense, as we will be devoting the rest of the semester to creating our own set of white papers. This week’s readings were very good for me since I had never read through an entire white paper. In the past, I would only skim through them in order to find certain information that I was looking for. The majority of the white papers that I have skimmed through in the past were more like the Motorola white papers. They consisted of technical information that would bore the average audience.

Audience
For these sets of instructions there are some key differences between the expert and novice audience. The main difference is the technical experience of the user. The expert audience should have prior experience configuring networking equipment using a terminal application such as HyperTerminal. Ideally they would have previously set up a commercial grade wireless access point in the past but this is not a requirement. The Novice audience is the group of people who do not fit into the expert audience but do kaznow how to perform basic actions on a computer.