I believe that one of the most important things that needs to be researched for our white paper topic is the audience. Our main audience needs to be researched in particular. Once the basic knowledge of our audience is understood it will be easier to tailor our white paper to suit their needs. We also need to understand the basic needs of our white paper. In short, we basically need to know why someone needs to be reading our white paper. It would also be a good idea to research the basic or more common implementations of wind turbine technology. This would also help me to become more familiar with the type of technology our white paper will be covering. Once I have a basic understanding of the audience and the technology I will be able to go into more depth with my research. I also feel that I should put some more time into researching white papers in general. I feel that I still do not really know what I need to know about white papers. Once I complete this research I should have a better understanding about how to design and implement my other research into our white paper.
The way that I will conduct my research is by mainly using the internet. I will use various search engines to try to find credible websites to gather information from. Once I actually find a credible website and some useful information I will use Microsoft Word and record any information that I find useful. I will label any information that I find with the website that I found it on. This way instead of just having a list of random web pages, I will actually have some information to go along with these pages so I am not trying to remember everything from a list. This will also make sharing my research with my group easier.
Using Word
I really like your plan to use Microsoft Word to keep track of the websites and sources you find. I have used this method in the past with several projects, and it has worked out really well for me. It gives you a great way to know what information you have to go into your writing and also lets you identify what else you need to find/gain from your research. And I think you're right, it does make it a lot easier to share information with your group. You might also find it helpful for organizing your sources, since you could divide up which sites helped you with your audience, and which sites helped you with understanding the technology, etc.
Kristin
Working with the readings
Note: you need to be sure to incorporate the assigned readings into these reading reports. There is no other way to determine if you have done the assigned readings.
Think Twice
Audience is very important when writing any documents and I agree with you that one should look to the audience we are writing to. One of our criticisms involving our white paper proposal involved specifying our target audience. We listed our audience as small and large organizations; however, it seems that both organizations could want different things. So even when our audience was targeted at organizations we still had to specify which group we were aiming at. It just proves that we should think twice about our audience as we could over look something that we might take for granted.
Researching for the Audience
I completely agree with you when you said the most important thing is to research the audience. Since we are writing for an audience, we need put ourselves into their shoes and figure out what they need to know. The tone and language used in our white papers must match the expectations of the main audience. If they don't understand what we have written, then the paper will be a complete failure and we will have wasted a great amount of time (and possibly money if it's our job).
Also, writing down all the necessary information as you find it is a very good idea. I have been lazy during some projects in the past and have had to reorganize all of my notes and search for missing sources, but I am definitely going to be writing down everything I need right away this time.