English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

This week for me was my only week on the white paper project. I was not able to participate with my group to complete any of the other assignments, so after explaining my situation to my other group members they agreed to put me in charge of turning their rough draft into our final white paper.

I started by reading every e-mail, blog post and group discussion I could find to get a handle on how they settled on a topic and who their target audience was. From there I thought that it was important that I include one more topic. I thought that the topic of renewable energy was lacking something if wind power was not included. My fellow group members had done research on solar, hydro and nuclear power, so I wrote a section on wind power that fit in with the format of the white paper rough draft. Unfortunately, this made our paper too long and another group was already covering wind power so this section was cut out of the final draft.

I received a list of websites and a copy of the rough draft in a .doc file and I went to work. I made the changes suggested by professor Tirrell and then polished the rest of the paper making changes to grammar and layout. I sent multiple copies to the group via e-mail for their approval and received great suggestions from them. I also used Purdue’s online writing lab as a reference to correctly site all our sources throughout the paper.

I also completed our group’s weekly activity report and posted both that and our final draft on the course website. I had discussions with several group members over e-mail and on the phone before submitting the final draft and received excellent suggestions to make the paper even better.