English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

This week, I focused on editing the white paper final draft. I worked with my group members to make changes to the white paper in order to address the needed improvements mention in Professor Tirrell's blog comments. The main focus was on making the white paper business oriented rather than consumer oriented. This involved mainly editing the introduction and conclusion, but also editing the descriptions of the individual phones themselves.

Last week, I mainly worked on the white paper draft. I was the sole person responsible for creating the draft. Of course, the entire team will later edit the document -- my job was to start us off. I started the week with doing some additional research and preparing my part of the research as paragraphs to include in the white paper. I also contacted my team members and asked them to send me the information they collected from their research. Everyone uploaded documents to the shared workspace website and I used those to start off the white paper.

The rough draft is attached.

The BlackBerry is a smart phone targeting business users and is being developed by a Canadian company called Research in Motion (RIM). Unlike the iPhone and Windows mobile, the BlackBerry is not backed by a software giant such as Microsoft and Apple.

The iPhone is a smart phone developed by Apple. It is currently one of the newest types of phones available on the market (except for notably the Google Android). Ever since it was introduced in 2007, the iPhone has gotten tremendous support from personal and business users. One of the main reasons for its success is the high performing hardware and completely new and intuitively designed operating system.

Unlike the iPhone and the BlackBerry, Windows Mobile does not refer to a specific phone. Windows Mobile is an operating system (much like Windows). Almost all mainstream cell phone manufacturers offer phones which run the Windows Mobile operating system. The operating system is independent and can be used with any carrier regardless of whether they are GSM or CDMA.

The Windows Mobile operating system has been developed by Microsoft and has been made to look much like the popular Windows operating system for PC’s. The newer versions of Windows Mobile even provide a simplified version of Microsoft Office so that users can view and modify word documents, and spreadsheets. Users also get access to a simplified version of Microsoft Outlook to receive and send email even in HTML format. If users subscribe to a data plan, they can use a variant of the popular Internet Explorer to browse the web.

A strong sense of ethics can be just as bad as a weak one. I have a friend (Joe) who thinks every one of his actions and would almost never do something that seems even suspiciously unethical. As a result he silently suffers at his workplace. For example, Joe contributes to the project but the manager mistakenly gives another person the credit for the work. Even though Joe did the work, his sense of ethics prevents him from claiming credit and criticize the other person for accepting the credit.

My group’s project is on educating people about the different smart phones available to business users so that companies can better pick cell phones that they want to purchase in bulk. We have broken up the research into four parts: one for each member. The four parts are (1) operating systems and software, (2) hardware, (3) public opinion, and (4) support. I will be conducting research mainly related to part 1, operating systems and software.

The first week of this project was focused on getting started. I began by participating in discussions over email with the rest of my team. We emailed ideas for the topic of the project to each other. After everyone sent in their feedback, I tallied up the results and discovered that everyone voted for smart phones. This is how we chose our topic.

White papers are quite useful. They are well written and well reviewed papers that go into depth about a topic. For this reason, they can also be a lot of work.

Companies can use white papers to sell their products. The white papers allow them to educate others and spread the word about their products. There are a lot of cases when people would feel much better about buying a product if they had more in depth knowledge about it.