English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

Date: April 24, 2009
To: Professor Rivers
From: Group 2
Subject: Group 2 Activity Report – Week 15

This week began the wrap up of our project. We began work on the draft of our white paper. In order to do this effectively, there was a large amount of collaboration. This was done through the use of group wide emails. This helped ensure that everyone was aware of what was going on and help insure transparency for group decisions. In addition to the group wide emails, private emails were exchanged amongst group members. This was primarily done to make sure that all of the work complemented each other and that none of it was redundant

As far as the actual writing goes, our white paper was broken up into portions and these portions were then assigned amongst our group. Overall, the writing assignments were very similar to the research assignments. We figured that since each person had already researched those topics that it would make the most sense for them to write about what they had researched. Ben was in charge of discussing the current problems associated with power plants and the power infrastructure. Bjdunfor was in charge of writing about the technical aspects of three different wind turbines. These aspects included technical specifications and performance data. Bpoleary covered details that would help a reader determine whether or not wind power would be an ideal solution for them. Ymyang wrote about Bergey, Enviro and Skystream, three companies that manufacture the residential wind turbines that bpoleary covered. In the end each group member emailed their portion of the white paper to bpoleary, who then combined all of the work and ensured that all of the writing was consistent. Early on the week it was decided that ymyang’s thumbnail would serve as an adequate layout for our white paper. As a result of this, the white paper was formatted in this fashion.