English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

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.

Rough draft attached.

This week our group focused our attention on collaborating all of our gathered information and obtained knowledge, and creating a unified white paper. We used time toward the beginning of the week to coordinate the design of our white paper, and settle upon a mutually acceptable format, based on our thumbnails we each created. The group eventually decided to base this format off of my thumbnail. In this way, the white paper would feature a two-column style, to take proper use of white space, and incorporate a balance of illustrations and color distribution.

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 I worked on my part of the white paper project which is performance. In this part I plan on telling the reader about these products in terms of specs and how well they operate. I put them all in the same formatting and made each part almost exactly the same in terms of layout so you could figure out where the same information is in each part to create a kind of comparison type paper. I used some of the information from the previously written research blogs and also did some more research to come up with more hard date.

It was nice to see our project come together without any giant problems this week.

I spent most of my time this week working on the layout of our white paper draft. I wrote the introduction, designed the cover page quickly using images from our report, and then created a table of contents. After formatting my own section of the draft (the introduction), I began integrating the pieces that Joe, Pat and Shane had e-mailed to me.