English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

After reviewing the instructor’s feedback regarding our white paper proposal, my team and I are confident that we have chosen a sound topic and now have a more precise heading to guide our research. Initially, we had planned to target organizations of all sizes with our white paper, regarding both problem and solution. However, as Nathaniel has suggested, we have tightened the focus of our paper to target a single group, small organizations that suffer from a lack of collaboration, which in turn affects performance in each business sector, as well as in the organization as a whole.

I believe that one of the most important things that needs to be researched for our white paper topic is the audience. Our main audience needs to be researched in particular. Once the basic knowledge of our audience is understood it will be easier to tailor our white paper to suit their needs. We also need to understand the basic needs of our white paper. In short, we basically need to know why someone needs to be reading our white paper. It would also be a good idea to research the basic or more common implementations of wind turbine technology.

From the Thompson Handbook, this chapter covered a huge portion of how to research and effectively use it. The two main ways that I will be researching the White Paper project are going to be online research and field research.
How to conduct research? It is a pretty generic question for most college students. We have all conducted research, but have we properly been doing it? From this chapter I have picked up on a couple of things I have been leaving out in the last couple of years. One thing that I haven’t done was keeping a small booklet, notes, or anything to record my thoughts.

Research is an important tool to use when writing any document. It is needed for accurate results, procedures, facts, and other important items that will soon flow through our fingertips when we are writing our papers.

For our project (wireless router options), we have decided that we’d like to research three or four routers in a relatively narrow price range. These routers will probably be designed for home use. The intent of the research is to document the advertised features of each product, but also find the strengths and weaknesses. My plan is to check the manufacturer’s website for specs on my assigned router, as well as find related reviews and benchmark reports via various search engines.

Research for our white paper proposal was minimal, as we basically worked with knowledge that our group already contained. After posting and receiving feedback on our proposal I can see that we really need to identify a single intended audience. Our other most important aspect is researching and explaining in a non-biased fashion the competing technologies that compete with SharePoint.

With the focus of our group's proposal a little off track, some of the research I've already conducted won't apply to our slightly shifted topic. The focus is now on the general IT needs of educational institutions (both small and large scale), and the white paper's decision focuses on what software solutions are viable and at what costs. Most schools today use closed source, commercial software, and have had great success, but others are finding value in open source and other free software. We want to present the case for both sides, and in several areas of software including operating systems, and word/office processing suites. The paper will be catered to the audience of school board directors; those who are in charge of decisions concerning IT funding. We want to educate this type reader on this topic, so IT costs can be controlled, while still offering powerful IT advantages to students and faculty.

What my group originally decided on was to do a white paper on was wireless network security. My research in the situation was going to be on WEP/WPA key protection. I believe that the type of research that I would most need is the technical data about how effective this key protection would be and how it compares to other variants of security. We are however changing course since the solution the wireless security could include all the options we were thinking and it was not a necessity to pick from our choices as a white paper usually implies.

The readings for this week all focused on research and applying research in literature. I was not looking forward to starting my research for this project, but the tips offered in these chapters makes it seem a little more manageable. As I begin my research this week, I think I will begin by doing some preliminary research. I want to spend my first day of research getting comfortable with the keywords associated with our topic and try to find as many sources of credible information as possible. I will make a list of all of these sources so that I can easily go back to each one.

The Thompson Handbook gives a good outline of the research process that we should follow. We have already analyzed and decided on the subject we want to cover for the white paper project. The next steps will involve reviewing tests that discuss the topic and considering the elements of the issue of renewable energy. We will first want to find out what has already been said and proposed as a solution. Another important thing to gain from these texts is the knowledge of whether people are satisfied with the state of these text’s solutions.