English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

Since my group’s first topic and audience didn’t quite work with the requirements for the white paper project, I spent the beginning part of the week trying to find new ideas for a topic. The two best topics that I could think up were campus security issues and child locating devices. On Wednesday, I met with my group in a Google Chat to decide what our topic would be. After I presented my topic choices, and everyone else explained theirs, we decided to do our white paper about the different web browsers that were available to small companies. I then let everyone know that I would write the second proposal for our new topic. I wrote the new proposal on Wednesday night and then posted it on Google Docs. After receiving feedback from other group members, I submitted the new proposal on the course website.

The next thing that I focused on was beginning to do research. I already had Firefox and Internet Explorer on my computer, but I did install Opera. I then spent some time using each one to try and see what their similarities and differences were. I next tried to focus my research on our audience, which proved to be rather difficult. I could not figure out the right sets of words to put together that would give me the information that I was looking for. I tried all different combinations of “small companies”, “browser needs”, “internet needs”, and various others but found very little useful information. Finally, after looking at the research that Tom had completed and some of the key words that he found in his research, I was able to start finding more pertinent information. The plan for the upcoming week is to spend a few hours each day researching using these keywords, to find out as much as I can about our audience. This information will be extremely crucial when I reach the writing phase of this project.