English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

During this week starting from Monday (20th) to today, Friday (24th), our group has primarily worked on creating the rough draft of the White Paper.

Date: April 24, 2009
To: Nathaniel Rivers, Instructor
From: Group 1
Subject: Group 1 Activity Report #4

This week has proven to be the most progressive thus far, as we worked toward such an important milestone in our project, the rough draft. The majority of the work that we’ve produced this week was done independently, but we’ve held 3 team meetings to discuss and plan how to tackle the rough draft.

Rough draft attached.

This week our group focused our attention on collaborating all of our gathered information and obtained knowledge, and creating a unified white paper. We used time toward the beginning of the week to coordinate the design of our white paper, and settle upon a mutually acceptable format, based on our thumbnails we each created. The group eventually decided to base this format off of my thumbnail. In this way, the white paper would feature a two-column style, to take proper use of white space, and incorporate a balance of illustrations and color distribution.

This week has been a very productive one for Group 3. Using the comments from our thumbnails and emails between the group members, we selected Nigel's layout as the one that we would use for our white paper. The main reason we selected this layout was that we all liked the two-column layout that he used. We felt that this was the best way to balance white space with text. He also used a summary section at the end that will help those who want a quick overview of each section.

This week our group has been working to complete the rough draft of our white paper. First, we completed our new thumbnail design over this past weekend. After reviewing each member’s thumbnails from last week, we were able to combine the best attributes into a new design template. We also decided to use Adobe InDesign to create a master template that could be used for the entire paper.

Date: April 24, 2009
To: Professor Rivers
From: Group 2
Subject: Group 2 Activity Report – Week 15