English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

Crunch time was the underline theme for our white paper project this week. I had finish doing most of the research for my topic with Firefox and started grouping my research information together. I then created an outline of Firefox features that would be consider important/useful for our targeted audience to present to my group.

This wee

Date: April 26, 2009
To: Professor Rivers
From: Brian O’Leary, Group 2
Subject: Individual Activity Report 4

This activity report accounts for the progress I have made from April 20th to April 26th.

Date: April 26, 2009
To: J. Tirrell
From: Scott Stella, Group 7
Subject: Individual Activity Report 4

With research mostly complete and a rough draft due Friday, this week was spent writing and organizing the content.

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.