Wind Turbine Rough Draft

re: Wind Turbine Rough Draft

Nathaniel's picture

With respect to the core of the assignment, the white paper is solid: you have outlined three solutions in an unbiased fashion with some attempt to compare them across a common rubric. Also, I find your set-up of the issue and possible for need for wind turbines to be very well done. Some of the other groups did not do as well when it came to introducing the audience the problem and the potential solutions represented in the white paper. There is, however, room for improvement in both content and design.

  • Provide an executive summary, an introduction, and a conclusion. You cover this somewhat in the "Current Issues" section, but there needs to be something prior to this. The executive summary (which is distinct from the introduction) summarizes the entire white paper. An introduction needs to address not just heat pumps but the problem they solve. The introduction needs to discuss the purpose of the white paper as well as its audience. The conclusion simply restates the main points of the document. In other words, these missing sections will provide the necessary framework for this white paper.
  • Balance your sections. Your discussions of each technology need to overlap so as to allow the reader to properly compare them (apples to apples, as it were). For instance, the reader is told how many dealers there are for the Bergey BWC Excel but not for the either the Skystream or the Enviro Engine. The reader is told that the Skystream has "low acoustic pollution," but is told nothing about the acoustic pollution of the Bergey or the Enviro. Additionally, the Envrio section contains no bulleted summary list. The Bergey section contains sidebars on "Experience" and "Configuration" and the Enviro on "New Approach" and "No Tower Needed." This is important information, and it should remain, but you need to structure the sections and the descriptions of the technologies so that readers can compare them across the same specifications. This is the kind of balance and consistency that are necessary to allow informed decision-making on the part of the reader.
  • Each section reads more like a "pitch" for each technology. While the document is balanced, it does not provide much by way of drawbacks or costs. The reader knows what they can get from the technology, but there isn't enough on what they will have to give for one or the other. This is an important omission.
  • Provide captions and labels for all of your images. Remember, white papers are rarely read all the way through by every reader; some just read the summaries and captions.
  • Citations are needed.This is a big problem that needs to be addressed; otherwise, plagiarism becomes a real concern.

Other minor (though important issues):

  • Provide summaries of the subsections in the "Performance" section. Again, account for readers who are "raiding" the document.
  • Avoid 2nd person in professional documents. It is too informal.
  • The white paper contains too much "wasted space" around images. Consider wrapping the text around images: in particular, pages four, five, and six have too much wasted white space.
  • Revise the text for concision.
  • Read text out loud to catch awkward and/or confusion sentence constructions and phrasing.

With these revision, your white paper will be in much better shape.