English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

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.

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.

This week our group’s main priority was to complete the white paper draft. In order to achieve this, we had to organize our approach and deliver accordingly. I began initiating the process by emailing everyone on Monday. The first thing I suggested we did as a group was to choose a thumbnail design and divide the work properly. Through a series of replies we decided to work on individual portions of the white paper relative to the research everyone has done.

The majority of this week was spent writing and revising the white paper. On Monday, I met with my group online to discuss the writing of the white paper. Once we decided on all of our sections and the format of our paper, I began writing. I got started writing the Opera section of the paper using Stephens notes. On Tuesday, I finished up writing the Opera section and started to write the introduction. On Wednesday, I used Gary's notes to write the Firefox section of the paper and then finished writing the Introduction and Executive Summary portions of the paper.

In week 15 the rough draft finally came together. I began the week by writing my section and putting all of the sources in the research blogs to use. On Monday, our group met online to decide the final structure of the rough draft. We decided to use Adam Water’s thumbnail and have an introduction, conclusions, and three important sections of the paper. On Friday, the group sent the paper to me for me to put the paper together and edit the large items. I began by creating a title page along with the basic layout of the paper using Adam Water’s thumbnail.

This activity report summarizes the progress that I have made this week in regard to the white paper project.

Although there was only one deliverable assigned this week, that is the rough draft, there was much work to be done to complete this document. The majority of the time and work that I’ve dedicated to the rough draft was primarily spent refining the research I had performed for the previous week and composing the introduction of the white paper. This portion went relatively smoothly and I was pleased with the turnout.

This week I spent my time focused on writing my rough draft. After our first online group meeting, we divided up the parts of the reports. I was supposed to write my section comparing Google groups to Microsoft SharePoint. I decided the best way to handle this would be to split up the sections of my part into different categories. I felt that by doing this I can compare them better while informing our target audience about how Microsoft SharePoint does things better than Google Groups, without directly telling them that. I did some more research on my topic before I started to write.

This week was quite productive for me. Mainly I worked on organizing my research and producing my part of the white paper for the rough draft. I analyzed each of my sources and picked out the most credible ones. Then I went through and decided which would be best for the scope of what I would be discussing in the paper. After that I pretty much had all of my sources narrowed down and had decided what information I would be using from each.

This was a busy week for me again with school and work, but I found time to get it all done. Really the only thing that we had to do this week was to prepare our rough draft of our white paper. I had previously done my research blogs so I pretty much knew what I wanted to put into the paper, but I had to put in the right format. Basically what I did was take all of the information from my research and put it into the same category for each phone. For example I put the size and weight together, colors together, and all of the different hardware and specification information together.