English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

This week I revised my performance section of the white paper. I took into account the advice from the instructor on how to make it better and be more usable as a white paper. The first thing I had to do was make brief captions for each chart that I had placed on the different turbine performance outlines.. These captions just gave a basic overview of what you were seeing in terms of the charts and graphs that I used. The other part that needed some help was to make a bulleted summary of the information I put in the main paragraphs of the performance part.

This week I worked on my part of the white paper project which is performance. In this part I plan on telling the reader about these products in terms of specs and how well they operate. I put them all in the same formatting and made each part almost exactly the same in terms of layout so you could figure out where the same information is in each part to create a kind of comparison type paper. I used some of the information from the previously written research blogs and also did some more research to come up with more hard date.

This week was mainly devoted to research. I did a lot of searching to find a few different types of wind turbines and ended up using three of them on my research blogs. I even watched some video clips about them being used by famous people. I saw that Jay Leno was putting one of them on top of his garage. I thought was good because Jay can afford all the electricity he wants but he would rather “go green” by using solar, as well as wind power. I found that with the combination of the two he doesn’t even use any electricity from the grid most of the year.

The third website I chose to research is www.enviro-energies.com. This type of wind turbine is for people who would like a lower profile type turbine and can use it in low wind applications. These turbines are vertical axis turbines that are mounted on rooftops. Rooftop units such as these make use of the extra wind power generated from the rooftop effect, which is where the wind blows harder because of the pitch of your roof. The enviro-energy turbines also generate power at a much lower speed.

The second website I will be conducting research from is www.bergey.com. The Bergey BWC Excel has won the award of America’s best selling residential home wind power system. This system has one of the bigger price tags for the home wind turbine market but has some of the biggest output numbers I’ve seen so far. It is also one of the largest wind turbines in terms of sheer size. Some of these models are anywhere from 60 to 120 feet high and the blade diameter is some 22 feet which makes it a colossal wind turbine.

My first website that I will be researching is www.skystreamenergy.com. This website is all about the newly introduced Skystream 3.7 wind turbine. This particular turbine seems to be larger than most of the other models I’ve seen but it has many great reviews on how it actually functions. The Skystream 3.7 works in tandem with the power you receive from the utility company. If there is no wind, you are using power from the utility company.

I believe that the biggest problem in terms of ethics for the white paper will be copyright laws. Since we are using lots of information taken from the internet we must cite our sources properly and make sure to follow the rules dealing with copyright laws. Plagiarism, which is copyright infringement where you use someone else’s text, tends to be a problem commonly involved with online researching and can have very serious consequences since it is in fact enforceable by law.

This week our group had many discussions about what we are planning to do in terms of researching for the white paper. We split the research into four different parts which were problem, solution, technology, and performance. I am doing the performance aspect of the research which will include which wind turbine is the “best” in the category of home application wind turbines. When doing my research I plan to look into the differences in brands and figure out the top three or four brands of turbines.

As the Thompson Handbook says the key to good research is to actually “care” about the topic on which you are researching. If you don’t really care about the topic you are trying to research odds are the information you gather and write about will be weak and not able to complete the task it is supposed to. Another important element in researching is to make sure to plan ahead. Many people tend to procrastinate and wait until the last minute to research their chosen topic, which typically ends up with poor results.