English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

The main point from this week’s reading, Chapte5 in the TCT, is the discussion of ethics of peoples motives what is socially and culturally acceptable and how to incorporate proper use of other people’s legal property.

I find that the example of the Einstein letter was useful in understanding how ethics can be good and bad. With all intentions Einstein wanted to help prevent the Nazis from creating and using the atomic bomb by helping the US crating the atomic bomb before the Nazis.

Individual Work Blog
Date: April 12, 2009
To: Professor Tirrell
From: Zebulon Rouse, Group 7
Subject: Individual Activity Report 2

This report is the summary of the progress toward the White Paper project, starting from last Sunday (April 6) to today (April 12).

Throughout this week, we started to split up the researching assignments. My part is researching on the public opinion of all three phones. The other part I contributed to the project was writing the weekly group activity report.

After this week, week 13, our group is making great progress toward our White Paper project. This week mainly concentrated on making the gnatt chart as well as researching and combining our thoughts on our topic. Also, we have divided up the how the research was going to broken up.

From the Thompson Handbook, this chapter covered a huge portion of how to research and effectively use it. The two main ways that I will be researching the White Paper project are going to be online research and field research.
How to conduct research? It is a pretty generic question for most college students. We have all conducted research, but have we properly been doing it? From this chapter I have picked up on a couple of things I have been leaving out in the last couple of years. One thing that I haven’t done was keeping a small booklet, notes, or anything to record my thoughts.

Individual Work Blog
Date: April 5, 2009
To: Professor Tirrell
From: Zebulon Rouse, Group 7
Subject: Individual Activity Report 1

This report is the summary of the progress toward the White Paper project, starting from the initial date (March 30) to today (April 5).
Throughout this week, I have sent out an email initiating the communication process among the group. From that point we had submitted topics which we were interested in.

We have decided to do our white paper project on some of the more popular PDA/smart phone’s that are on the market today, including the IPhone, Blackberry Storm, and the G1. Our plan is to successfully inform the reader about each one of the phones characteristics, features, some pros and cons, and give them some general information about their operating systems. We will try to successfully inform the reader without sounding biased about any of the phones or manufacturers.

This week has been mostly about organizing our collaboration, choosing our topic, and writing the proposal.

Before reading the context for this project, I had no idea of what a white paper was. I rarely knew the term let alone what kind of information was being presented. What is their purpose? Who reads them? Who doesn’t? These were questions I had when first becoming aware that we were writing “White Papers”. Reading through the context I began to understand the importance and use of the papers, as well as who needs them and who doesn’t.