English 421: Technical Writing

The attached pdf provides a lot of background on multimedia and is very helpful to any technical writers looking for a career in that area. It first describes what constitutes multimedia. It is simply a method to combine various forms of media in a creative way to convey information. Using multimedia gets the attention of the audience. It can be used to teach or to entertain.

For this week's article, I found another interest bit of info from the World Usability Day website on the usability job market.This particular career path has been on the rise for the past decade and a half. This is because there are always new types of technology coming out. The website lists two important criteria for those wanting to work in usability: 1) basic knowledge of computers or technology and 2) a desire to make technology easy for human use.

We continued working on our white paper project. After getting back our draft, we discussed several things we could do to improve the paper. We still needed to add an executive summary and table to contents. The group also discussed various things to make the paper better from a visual standpoint. We also started doing some things for the documentation project. We split up the work to provide step-by-step directions for doing various things on Sosius that may be helpful to our created persona, Habib Abdullah, because those douchebags from Drive-Thru Marketing did not want us.

This link leads to the web site of WorldUsabilityDay.org, an organization that is dedicated to making things easier and more user-friendly. The right side of the home page further describes the mission of this organization and includes a video of Bill Gates explaining the importance of usability. Apparently, on the second Thursday of November each year, they have events all over the world to raise awareness of the importance of usability and its research.

After the the deadline of the white paper was pushed back, our group (Jagerbombers) spent some time polishing up our paper and adding visuals. We got together in class and discussed how we can "sell" our collaboration application to the groups in Cat's other class. We typed up our memo to Drive-Thru Marketing to show the things they could do using Sosius.

~Tianyi

With today being election day, I decided to find an article dealing with technical writing on politics. This article describes how the Bush administration may have doctored or altered a white paper providing extra incentive to invade Iraq. Apparently the White House wrote the white paper justifying the invasion several months before the full intelligence report had been compiled.

Since we are on the topic of how to incorporate graphics into our white papers, I decided to find an article on importance of visual aids. Granted, this article talks specifically about visual aids in a powerpoint presentation, there is enough interesting information that can be applied to white papers. The most important bit I took from the article is when the author says that graphics and visual aids should only complement your paper or presentation.

This week, my team and I just continued to work on our white paper draft. We used the collaborative tools that form the basis of our paper to communicate. For my part, I wrote about Track My People and When Is Good and how they complement an application like Sosius. It took quite a few drafts as we had to reform the focus of our paper and cite everything correctly. On Thursday, we spent classtime discussing how to improve our draft with better visuals. We hope to meet this Sunday to polish the white paper up.

~Tianyi

After spending the past few weeks researching and obtaining sources on the web 2.0 applications we chose (When Is Good, Sosius, Track My People), we began to work on the annotated bibliography. The team put together the nine best/most credible sources we found and wrote a short summary for each. My job for this part was to provide 2 sources and edit the everything together so that it sounds like the same person wrote the whole bibliography. Andy contributed 2 of his sources and wrote the intro. Andrew also provided 2 sources and made sure that the citations were correct.

Since we spent all class discussing the credibility of sources, I decided to find an article on that subject that is hopefully credible itself because it is from an .edu site.

This is a pdf file from the website of Coastal Carolina University.