English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

This week was far more laid back than previous weeks, as things began to slow down with the end of the semester. We basically looked over our paper and made corrections to them as a group. I looked over the revision that Jack sent out to everyone. I paid close attention to see if the instructor’s feedback was attended to and looked over formatting and grammar. I also tried to pay close attention to the audience we were attempting to address and tried to make sure this was done so accordingly. The revised paper turned out to look better and heeded much of the instructor’s feedback.

This week our group was responsible for collaborating and delivering the final draft of our white paper project. We needed to update our original draft according to the instructor’s suggestions. There were several notes in the feedback that our group needed to address and complete for our white paper final draft deliverable.

Date: May 3, 2009
To: Professor Rivers
From: Isaac Townsend, Group 1
Subject: Individual Activity Report

This report summarized the work and progress completed since April 20th.

This week was a very busy one for me and my group because the final draft was due and there was a lot of things that I wanted to change around before we posted it. I put a lot of time trying to get our white paper rough draft into top condition.

This week was spent revising our group’s rough draft. From the feedback received, it was apparent that we needed to include an executive summary. I’ve used these several times in engineering reports, so I volunteered to write one for the group.

Throughout the rest of the week I read and re-read each of the drafts that were sent out. Once I realized that the D-Link router had draft-n capabilities, I notified Kristin that the introduction and specification tables needed to be updated accordingly. I also revised the executive summary to reflect the changes.

There seemed to be a little less to do this week when compared to previous weeks. I didn’t have to spend my time researching or writing a white paper since our rough draft had already been created. I reviewed our instructor’s comments and our white paper to thing about in what various ways it could be fixed. I looked over my notes from the research that I had take and made sure that I didn’t forget to include anything. I wanted to make sure that I didn’t forget any key parts that could make our white paper more effective. I think that our focus on open source vs.

I spent most of this week helping make revisions and making sure everyone was on the same page with the project. I also made sure that the group met on Gchat so we could all discuss what modifications needed to be made on the paper. This seemed to be the best solution since we would be able to have a live conversation about the changes vs. wasting time sending emails back and forth. We all decided on what changes needed to be made and we went to town making them. My job was to proof and make revisions on the various sections, posting them on Google Docs.

The following is my individual report of work from April 27 through May 3.

This report is the summary of my individual progress toward the White Paper project. This week is primarily objective was to complete the final draft for the White Paper Project; starting from last Monday (April 25) to today (May 3).

During the final week of our white paper project I have done a couple of things. After our initial meeting we discussed possible changes to make to each of our following sections flow better in the overall scheme of the paper. I needed to fix my section by focusing on the benefits, drawbacks, and conclusion of Google Documents. During my section of the rough draft I made a debate/comparison between that and Microsoft SharePoint. I realized the error in doing this and corrected my section for our final paper. I had to rework my entire section but that was OK with me.