English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

The following is my individual report of work from April 6 through April 12.

This week our group’s main priority was to change our proposal according to instructor feedback, establish research goals and begin working on our thumbnail deliverables. Given the vague audience we suggested, it was understand that our group needed to be more focused. In a number of replies, the group collectively decided the audience type (contractors) and the method our white paper will choose to relay its information.

2nd Individual Activity Report
For: Professor Rivers
From: Chris Kirkwood

During week 12 our group began preparing and planning for our project. We brainstormed ideas for our audience and created a chronological schedule to help us track the life cycle of the project. The group worked on delegating different functions of the project out to individuals and some as group functions. Following this we all reviewed our schedule of tasks, which was organized in a gantt chart.

This week was another uneventful week in terms of getting things done for this project. I had spent a majority of this week in Daytona Beach partaking in the NCA Cheerleading National Competition. I briefly did some research on our topic while in Florida. There was some talk about narrowing down our audience for this project but I didn't participate in that very much. The group chose to target small not for profit organizations as our audience, but like I said I did not participate in these discussions.

Our white paper project seemed to really take shape and get off the ground during this past week. Last week, we deciding upon a topic and established a general definition of our audience. We chose solutions to America’s oil dependence, focusing on sustainable energy sources and smart grid technologies. Initially, our audience was defined as “American political leaders”. The instructor feedback from our initial proposal suggested that this was vague and too broad for the sake of this project.

Once again, there was not editing to be done on the final project, so I didn't have much to do for that role. I continued to focus instead on trying to organize a plan for our content.

Last Sunday, I created a content outline for our initial topic, energy saving solutions, and posted it on Google Docs. The outline was the primary tool for deciding a direction for and delegating our research in our meeting last Sunday. I also initiated a "contacts" document for our group last weekend.

In my initial research efforts, my goal has been not necessarily to find information to include in the white paper itself, but to look for information that will help me proceed with my research. Our white paper will compare three web browsers for an IT department that is trying to choose one of them for use on its company's computers. Before doing the research on each of the browsers, we wanted to determine what current concerns of IT professionals are that would affect their browser decisions.

Here is my sample thumbnail.

On Sunday last week, I participated in our group chat during which we created our Gantt chart and set out a plan for how to divide our solutions. I volunteered to cover the introduction/problem for our White Paper.

Monday started with the group needing to renegotiate our proposal a bit. I participated in these e-mail conversations and e-mailed our re-proposed problems and solutions to our instructor.