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.

The first meeting primarily concerned the white paper design. My teammates and I began this portion be reviewing the various thumbnails we had created for the previous week, along with the feedback each member provided. For the most part, each thumbnail shared many qualities with the others within the group, but still retained individual benefits and drawbacks against the rest as well. Although any one of our thumbnails would likely suffice and prove effective, we have elected to use a combination of each member’s thumbnail, attempting to incorporate each unique asset, and voting on any aspects that overlap across multiple thumbnails. In hindsight, this strategy worked flawlessly and the design that we’ve produced as an aggregate of each of our contributions is significantly better than any of our individual designs.

After establishing the design that we would use, we held a second meeting to review and refine the content that each member should further research and prepare for the rough draft. This went smoothly, as each member was already prepared with ample research and resources to beginning writing his individual piece. The rest of the week primarily consisted of independent work, where each member continued to work on the piece he was responsible for.

The third meeting was held to bring together all of the information and content that we had gathered and to piece together the rough draft. We ran into some serious issues here, as the rough draft will show. The problem was mainly due to a misunderstanding. Although we each had felt that we knew what we were to prepare, and how it was to read, this wasn't exactly the case. After we all came together with our content, there were many conflicting formats and inconsistencies. This is one of the many things we will resolve in the final draft, in addition to collecting many more supplemental images and data tables. Once we had worked out all the severe kinks and performed the necessary editing, Jason took over to finalize everything with the conclusion. After doing so, each member reviewed the final document and suggested minor revisions. Although there were some serious obstacles, we were able to overcome most and have composed a pretty effective white paper. This paper, however, does have much work to be done before it can be considered the final draft, which is what we are preparing for in the upcoming week.