English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

This week was spent on the final draft of our white paper on renewable energy options. I met with the group Monday and made sure everyone was aware of the schedule for the rest of the week. I thought it was important that after the rough final draft was done, we should all have a look and give our approval or change it to what we thought would be better. My personal opinion of the final paper that we turned in is that it looked really professional and thorough and our group put a lot of work into it to make it look so.

This week was spent researching nuclear energy and deciding how I wanted to incorporate it into my section of the white paper.

This week was spent researching and compiling the rough draft for the white paper. We started off the week with a meeting on AIM to discuss how we wanted to proceed for writing. The group decided to have a brief introduction, explanation, costs and benefits, drawbacks, and environmental consequences for each type of energy.

Adam decided that smart grid technology didn’t really fit with the concept of nuclear, hydro, and solar energy and would probably make us go over our limit for the paper.

This week I helped make some final decisions regarding the audience. Last week we all came up with the best possible sources for our audience between general lawmakers to the general population. I suggested we use the American Federal Lawmakers as our audience, specifically the Secretary of Energy. The rest of the group agreed that this would be our primary audience.

For this research blog, I am choosing a journal article that is published by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The title of the article is Integrating Energy Options. I found this article in the Indiana University Library journal database of academic journals.

For this research blog, I will focus on the websites that will give statistical data and factual reports about nuclear power in the United States. Such websites include the Department of Energy website, http://www.energy.gov/energysources/nuclear.htm, and the website of the Nuclear Energy Advisory Committee, http://www.ne.doe.gov/.

The website http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/nuc_reactors/reactsum.html will be the main source of information for the nuclear power section of the white paper project. This website contains summaries of official energy statistics from the United States Government for up to the past 10 years. Since this website is a government run page, the information should be completely factual and unbiased. It will also give credibility to our white paper.

The reading for this week was very straightforward and contained most things I would consider to be common sense for most people in term of ethics. I think the Albert Einstein example of being torn between social ethics and his personal ethics is a dilemma that many of us has faced and had to deal with, often resulting in guilt or doubt.