From the reading this week, I gathered many details about White Papers. When I began the reading, I wasn’t entirely sure what was meant by the phrase but now understand. White papers are used in many contexts from business, to industrial, and even governmental. The similarity is that the subject of the White Papers is often technical and the goal is to achieve certain credibility and reliability with the reader. The format is also generally similar with a title page, executive summary, body/argument, and conclusion.
While the information presented in white papers should, obviously, be factual, there is a difference in the context of different types of white papers such as governmental and marketing white paper. The governmental white papers that I read on the bitpipe.com seemed to generally layout a certain proposed law or a proposed strategy for legislation. On the other hand, marketing white papers usually seemed to push a new product. While the topics are different, the goal is the same. Convince someone to agree with you and endorse, vote, or buy your product.
Technical white papers are usually less pitchy than the governmental and marketing white papers, depending on who wrote it, and generally just want to convey how the technology works. An important aspect of these documents, similar to the instructions sets we wrote earlier this semester, is that they want to convey technical information in an easy to understand language without seeming condescending to the novices, and too ‘dummied down’ for people who might be experts.
Ethos was mentioned in the readings this week and we were told to pay particular attention to it. When I step back to look at white papers as a whole, ethos will be very important because essentially the white paper is a persuasive document. Ethos refers to establishing a rapport with the reading audience that shows them your expertise and knowledge on which they will judge your competence on the subject.
Walk the line R12
I like when you said that technical white papers try to give information “…without seeming condescending to the novices, and too ‘dummied down’ for people who might be experts.” We have had many instances in this course where we need to walk a line between one area and another to try and find the happy medium. I think this is the quintessential version of that for the current project. I also think that it’s going to be a harder medium to find than in the past because there is a good potential that we will have a larger base of people that make for a much wider range between novice and expert.
Shane
Walking the line between
Walking the line between overly technical and under technical can be a difficult task. As it is mentioned in Lpetrovi’s post the general idea can be to “dumb down” documents, but this can prove to be quite a challenge. The challenge is in deciding what information one should include and what information one should remove. As it was stated in our reading, over complicating a white paper will only dissatisfy the reader, but if we dumb down the document too much the reader may feel like we are insulting their intelligence. The process of developing these whitepapers will certainly test our reader analysis skills.
Thanks
JFlitt
www.JFlitt.com
"Dumbing down"
Making your paper understandable to your audience is important, but I also think what the audience wants or needs to know is as much of a constraint as what the audience will be cabable of understanding.
An executive summary is a good example. An executive may not have time to read and entire report; the executive summary basically gives a quick rundown on a problem and corresponding position that delivers the most important arguments and findings to the executive. Is an executive too dumb to understand technical details? Probably not. But the executive does need something quick that outlines the major points and facilitates a d decision.
TANoNati you make a good
TANoNati you make a good point in that the executive summary can play a crucial role for the audience whom which it is intended. This brings up another interesting idea, is it possible that with the many different parts of the white paper, that each part should be written in context for different audiences? This presents a new challenge if you ask me. As it was described in the previous weeks, writing for your intended audience and readers is extremely important, but deciding how to develop your document so it is usable by all of the possible readers can prove to be quite a task.
Thanks!
JFlitt
www.JFlitt.com
Audience is key.
Like both of you have said, we have talked about writing to audiences in a way that relates to both the novice and expert readers. We have to make sure to not make it too easy yet not too complicated, so people either think we are making fun of their intelligence or just plain can’t understand it because it is too complex. Going alone with what Shane said I think that the audience will be a little harder to figure out in this project because it can cover such a broad audience in general. When working on these projects we will all have to spend a little time and effort just on the audience alone.
Find the right audience
The statement you made about conveying our information in a manner such that we are not, “seeming condescending to the novices, and too ‘dummied down’ for people who might be experts,” sums up exactly what we need to do for this project. Since we are creating a technical white paper, we need to create a document that will explain the solution to a problem correctly for a specific audience ranging from experts to novices. In some cases though, our audience might only be experts or people who know a lot about the subject. For example, if you were writing a white paper on how to stop a structural member in a building from falling over, you would know that your audience would most likely be an engineer or a person who has lots of experience in the field.
Audience
Audience has been and will continue to be an issue to consider when writing any paper that will published. Technology papers can inform us of the technology out there but it is also trying to get us to invest on the next hot gadget that will hit the shelves. Considering our audience for this makes us try a different writing style. One that will sound informative without sounding pushy to the audience we are writing to. I think one way of doing this treating it like a informative paper, that way we will not get tempted to make it sound like a some marketing press everyone can see right through.
audience
I agree with your statement on sending a message to the right audience. We want to be able to produce a document that everyone can understand but isn’t too advanced or too simple. However, I think there is a place for highly technical white papers. We can’t simply decide that a document shouldn’t be technical because a group or majority won’t understand it. For example, a white paper on a certain type of machinery should be very technical and informative. While everyone might not understand it, it will serve its purpose. The opposite is also true. Ideally, all documents would be understood by everyone, but it’s not the case.