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.

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

This week our group spent most of its time using and researching the three different browsers (Opera, Firefox, IE) and our audience. We are becoming familiar with all of the browsers and starting to see the real benefits of each, when compared on the same scale. We all have favorite features with each browser, but our research is still focused on the point of which would be the preferred browser for an IT specialist/department. As a group we are beginning to focus in on the main features we want to highlight and compare.

This week our group began researching our topic of Open Source vs. Microsoft, and began formulating some of the whitepaper designs. The research proceeded once we had agreed upon a solid primary audience and the motive of the whitepaper. Once we were able to break down our audience into a more specific set of user we found it would be easier to research the subject.

This week proved to be very difficult for us to find time to discuss our white paper. We were all busy (and free) at the wrong times, with either our work schedules or classes (and other projects) interfering basically every night. However, we were still able to communicate thru email and our Google Groups group.

Continuing from last week we each had quite a bit to work on this week. Most of it was working on the research and creating thumbnails and writing a reply for each of the group member’s thumbnail. For our group we already had the lists of what parts of the research each of us were going to analyze.

Last week, there was much discussion about the audience whom we were focusing our white paper to. We went from the general category of political leaders, to lawmakers and policy makers, to American energy policy makers, and finally cabinet members of the US Department of Energy. We decided this week to focus the paper to Steven Chu, who is the US Secretary of Energy. Secondary readers will likely be his cabinet members. Having a specific person in mind when drafting our white paper will help us imagine how specifically he will use the white paper.