English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

For this week’s deliverable, I spent most of my time gathering relevant information for my part of the rough draft. At the beginning of the week we got together on AIM to discuss the objectives for our rough draft. I chose to write about the OpenText ECM Suite. I scrolled through my list of credible sources and collected any information and visuals I thought would work well in the white paper. As I wrote my section, I tried to envision the visuals into the writing. This created a problem, however, since our group had yet to come to a decision on a final format for the document.

Crunch time was the underline theme for our white paper project this week. I had finish doing most of the research for my topic with Firefox and started grouping my research information together. I then created an outline of Firefox features that would be consider important/useful for our targeted audience to present to my group.

This wee

Date: April 26, 2009
To: Professor Rivers
From: Brian O’Leary, Group 2
Subject: Individual Activity Report 4

This activity report accounts for the progress I have made from April 20th to April 26th.

Date: April 26, 2009
To: J. Tirrell
From: Scott Stella, Group 7
Subject: Individual Activity Report 4

With research mostly complete and a rough draft due Friday, this week was spent writing and organizing the content.

I spent this week gathering my thoughts about all the information I had collected from the previous week’s research. I organized my research to decide how I could present my research in a non bias way. I found that it was a little difficult to think of wording some parts to not make the presentation of my research sound bias. I displayed some facts about how there is very little cost in purchasing when it comes to open source software. The fact that I made summaries of my researched sites allowed me to easily remember what information I had available to present.

Jason Flittner – Individual Activity Report

This week Group 1 used our free Monday and Wednesday evenings to meet and work on our white paper. We decided to split the sections of the white paper and that each of us would write roughly 400 words in order to complete the needed size of the whitepaper as a whole. I was tasked with writing the SharePoint dedicated section, and the others were to write about the other competing technologies, which Justin completing our intro. I also finished up the white paper with a quick conclusion.

This week was spent working on my part of our white paper rough draft. I took the facts I found while doing research last week and put them in to writing. Not only did I need to make sure that I stayed unbiased in my writing, I also really focused on making sure that I properly cited my sources. I hadn't ever cited my sources using footnotes so that was something new. However after looking it up in an MLA book I have, I found that it was quite simple. While I see how it might be better for a technical paper such as this, I much prefer a works cited page at the end.

Date: April 26, 2009
To: Professor Rivers
From: Isaac Townsend, Group 1
Subject: Individual Activity Report 4

This report summarized the progress made since April 20, 2009.