Our group decided to do our white paper on the topic of conserving energy and going green. We want to focus on simple and cheap/ free solutions that college students can use in their dorms or apartments. The three topics that we will focus on are using electricity, heating/ cooling, and laundry solutions. For electricity we will focus on the use of compact fluorescent bulbs to not only save energy, but also money. For heating and cooling we will explain the use of door sweeps, window seals, and other small improvements that can help reduce the need for heaters and air conditioning. Our laundry solutions will include washing with cold water and hanging clothes to dry rather than using the dryer. All of these solutions are very cost effective that would allow college students to reduce their impact on the environment as well as save money.
For research, we will primarily use the internet. We will look at the many utility companies available for statistics on energy consumption. We will also take a long look at GE and other light bulb manufacturers for information on compact fluorescent bulbs. Hopefully we will be able to find specific statistics from these companies to determine the amount of money students can save by using them. We also thought that we may be able to find some relevant information from the government and the EPA.
For this paper, our primary audience would be college students who want to go green, save money, or both. Our secondary audience would be parents of college students who would be likely to pass the paper on to their children. Our tertiary audience will be landlords who may also pass the paper along to their tenants. We also have many gatekeeping audiences. Jeremy Tirrell would be one. Dorm supervisors who may post the paper in public places and Universities who may post it on their websites would also be gatekeepers. Our main gatekeeping audience, though, would be the same as our primary audience, college students. For the measures included in our proposal to be effective, we would need our primary audience to pass the paper along to other students, making them gatekeepers.
Since our white paper will be targeting college students, we want to include a great deal of graphics. College students have plenty to read and the last thing they will want to read is a boring document with no graphics. Because of this, the use of white space will also be important. We want to give the readers plenty of space to rest their eyes, or be able to take a break when needed. One feature that we plan to incorporate is a side column to place summaries and important information. Hopefully this will help to catch the eye of potential readers and improve the overall appeal of the document. We will start with an introduction to green energy and most likely some statistics about wasted energy before introducing our three possible solutions to the problem. After describing our solutions in depth, we will close with a conclusion and a short section about the importance of spreading the word about energy conservation.
Our group decided that to divide the labor involved in this project, we would all take on one role from “the steak behind the sizzle” and we would all contribute to the research portion. Stephen will be our project manager, making sure that everything is done on time as well as taking care of submitting our weekly activity reports. I will be doing the writing. Tom will take care of the editing and help with writing when needed. Gary will be in charge of the graphic and design elements since he is our groups Computer Graphics Technology expert. As already stated, we will all have a hand in researching our topic and everyone will also have a say in the final stages of editing.
re: Group 6 Proposal
OK, you have a start here, but they are two issues to address. The first is that this really isn't structured as a white paper; it is structured as a set of instructions or a collection of tips. Keep in mind that the purpose of a white paper is to evaluate competing solutions for a specific problem, so that the reader can make an informed choice. Solution options are mutually exclusive, so the decision-making audience is only going to select one. For a white paper, you must identify a specific problem, but your proposal doesn't quite do this. What is the specific problem you address, and then what are the pros and cons of the competing solutions to that problem?
Imagine if the specific problem you were addressing was that the mother of a middle-class family of five people did not know what mid-sized sedan to buy. The corresponding white paper would present the strengths and weaknesses of the different makes and models (based upon cost, gas milage, room, features, etc.), but ultimately the audience is just going to select one of them, not buy them all. With your topic, you seem to be identifying different issues (electricity, heating/cooling, laundry) and then presenting tips for each one. The reader doesn't have to choose one option from many, because pursuing one option doesn't preclude him or her from pursuing the others. Indeed, you suggest that the reader should do them all.
You don't want this to be a set of instructions—i.e., here are ways to reduce your electricity usage, here are ways to address heating/cooling loss, and here are ways to make laundry more energy-efficient. This doesn't evaluate competing options; it presents uncontested solutions to three separate problems.
The second issue is audience. It doesn't seem likely that many college students would read a white paper (most people in this class indicated in their weekly comments that they hadn't heard of white papers before this project). A more appropriate audience would be a policy maker. What about someone on campus who makes these kinds of decisions for the school? Wouldn't that person benefit from an informed, unbiased analysis of the pros and cons of different options?
Let's consider how to hit both of these issues by refining your approach. Think about a white paper written for a policy maker at Purdue that evaluates different campus-wide programs that embrace green technologies. (This is a realistic scenario, because there are pushes for this, yet there are conversion costs, so it's unlikely that a policy maker could pursue them all simultaneously.) You could research these by seeing what other schools have done—things like recycling programs, changing the buses to alternative fuels, switching the campus to energy-efficient lighting, etc. Clearly, there would be pros and cons for these different options, including costs, returns, environmental impact (how much good is actually being done), duration (if you switched all the buses to ethanol would you have to switch them again to electricity in two years?), area of effect (if an option is designed to reduce global warming, reduce pollutants in water, etc.) and so on. This white paper would evaluate the pros and cons of the different options so that the audience can make an informed decision about selecting one based on his or her situational needs. That's what you're after.