English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

During the first week of the White Paper Project, I took the responsibility to initiate productivity. By sending out an email and compiling a list serve of my group, I was able to get thoughts exchanged between members. Having past teamwork experience, it was important to me to see that we got start early and offer a few ideas I already had. I began the first email on Wednesday, April 1st, to organize our team’s responsibilities and get everyone on the same page. I explained what we needed to get done and asked everyone’s opinions before we got started.

For this project we propose to cover the use of wind turbines as a renewable source of energy. The paper will go into detail about implementing these wind turbines domestically. This topic will cover a variety of subtopics related to wind turbines. One of the most important subtopics covered will be describing how wind turbines are able to convert wind into usable electricity. The paper will also provide a comparison amongst other popular renewable sources of energy such as solar power.

In many cases, relating to your audience can be ineffective and exhausting. For example, being able to provide a clear understanding of a brand new technology to the customer is not an easy task. However, there is a useful document called the white paper that allows education for target audiences efficiently and successfully. It is a well organized document geared to your audiences for an informative analysis. A white paper is offered for those interested in learning more about an issue of concern accompanied by valid data and important details on the situation.

In my novice instruction set, I chose to make the layout in landscape as opposed to portrait. It should help the inexperienced reader look ahead and before their task for easier reference. In addition to the pictures provided, I offered the novice readers additional remarks to help them further with the directions. Most of them are tips and suggestions on how to perform a certain direction. I elaborated more in the novice instructions and added a couple more steps that they will need to understand.

In this week’s Reading Response, the students are asked to read articles that focus on usability testing. Usability testing is experimenting your document in its functional nature with valid readers. There are several effective usability testing techniques that allow the writer to understand if their technical document is efficient enough for real world applications. Usability testing is broken down into two categories: Informal and formal testing. Each test is organized by experimentation on the sample of users.

A good friend of mine once said: “Presentation is not the most important thing. It’s the only thing.” This idea can be related to this week’s course readings. I believe that the design is very important to delivering work, if not the most important. Therefore, when developing our instruction project, there should be a considerable amount of time spent on designing and working on presentation. There are several great do’s and don’ts that are recommended by the readings that can help us create a powerful and effective document.

The process that I chose for project two is instructions for fixing a malfunctioning bicycle tire on a standard road bike. In detail, I will explain what to look for in a flat tire, the types of leaks a tire can have, the proper direction for patching or replacing a tire, and correctly pumping the tire to a sufficient pressure. Cycling is gradually becoming a more popular sport and the most common maintenance needed is tire care. I have been cycling for over three years and have had to change a countless amount of tubes and tires.