English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

This week was extremely productive for our group. We continued to research our individual pieces of the white paper draft, and worked on completing our research blogs. We shared some useful sources via e-mail while we worked.

In addition, we each created our own thumbnail for the design of the white paper. Interestingly, three out of the four of us chose some shade of blue to use as the main color in our thumbnail.

We met via Instant Messenger on Wednesday night to discuss our thumbnails and make sure we were all on the same page about how we might finish a draft of our paper for next week. Since we all chose a blue to use in our thumbnails, this made our decision about color relatively easy. We simply voted on the color we liked the best, and decided on a faded blue-green color. We also decided to use a two-column design, while recognizing that we may have to break this design at times for a larger chart or graphic. We decided that because of difficulties formatting in Word, we would recreate the thumbnail we had chosen in InDesign and use that to layout our draft and final white paper.

Because of this, we shifted whose responsibility it was to compile the draft, and thus needed to change around some other responsibilities to keep the workload even and account for some busy schedules near the end of the semester. We just traded a few dates around to make sure the work load was staying even.

In our group meeting, we also discussed citations and how to correctly use the footnote style suggested in the project description. The OWL page seemed unclear, so we consulted the MLA Handbook and also e-mailed our instruction to be sure we had a handle on this before we compiled our draft.

At this point, we’ve posted most of our research blogs, and one group member has already completed their portion of the draft, which just needs to be formatting into the thumbnail layout. We’re well on our way to a draft for next Friday!