English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

After the reading and some recent comments about our proposal there has been a lot I’m taking from this week’s lessons. First and foremost, our group discovered we really need to revamp our proposal. We discovered that we don’t have much of a specific audience and need to really address this big issue. So this is currently where the project is at. I’ve found that in order to research this topic we’re going to really need to slim down our audience focus. This week’s reading from the Thompson Handbook covered the importance of research and gave several strategies for successful research.

This week I played part in communicating our contact information with each other this week. Jack contacted everyone and we all replied with our email/phone/aim contact information. We all first agreed that we would rotate the job of our group activity report each week. Following this we started to formulate our topic. Once again all of this communication was through email.

This week’s reading on white papers had a very practical and informative affect on me. Through the past years I’ve dealt with white papers and found them to be very useful. However, I am simply but one type of audience. The biggest thing, once again, for a successful white paper is to clearly know your audience before the end product and address all of their needs through this end product.

My instructions are pretty similar. The novice instructions are more detailed and explain the tools used and terminology for the user. The expert instructions really assume you know you way around the OS and cut to the point with less explanation of why your doing each step and are more cut to the chase type of thing. They provide the same commands and accomplish the same thing though.

I found this week’s reading to be quite interesting. I really like how the book stated that revision process of your document is actually “re-visioning”. It made me realize how you should gain a new perspective on your document through this process. In addition to the revising process, I found the reading on usability testing to be quite practical. However, I did find some subjects to be sort of questionable.

This week’s readings outline what makes our design of our products more effective. As we have read our products are ultimately documents and there are many considerations that must go into effectively writing these documents. I was amazed at how design can influence readers in so many ways. Chapters 24 and 25 provided me with some new material that I will hopefully use in my writing to successfully use design and visual content in order to provide a more effective document that will ultimately make reading more “invisible” to the audience.

I will be writing a guide on how to crack wireless 802.11 network securities in order to recover a lost or forgotten wireless key. This guide is to be used only on your own network and is not being written to attack someone else’s network. This guide could effectively be used to recover a lost password for your wireless network if you have forgotten it or lost that piece of paper you probably wrote it on, which is a horrible idea in the first place. I am currently a TA for a wireless infrastructure class and am also currently studying wireless securities.