English 421: Technical Writing

 So at first I thought this was kind of a strange thing to do in an english class, but I usually do not think about things too deeply right at the beginning.  This changed after we were told to think about how putting the pirate ship together with the a large group of people was analogous to a technical writing and our white paper project.

On the terms of a technical writing, the obvious are that we need detailed yet simple instructions to be able to put it together and have it turn out the way it was supposed to.  If the instructions were still jumbled then it would be a lot harder to put together and something horrible might come out of it. Next, as in all documents trying to explain how to do something pictures are a great help.  We were able to to match numbers on the instructions to numbers on the pictures and the parts of the ship which helped immensely.  Today, pictures and other forms of media are becoming a vital part in conveying something complex into something that is easily understood.

I believe it represents our white paper project in how we went about putting this ship together.  At first we threw out suggestions about how we should start.  After that we kind of split up into small groups, and when that did not work we put all the instructions together and organized them by the pictures that we were provided.  This method seemed to work the best.  This is like how we started our white paper project, we all looked for different sites and technologies to use and then finally collaborated on which one we would actually choose.  These two both deal with how to organize how we will do something and what is the most efficient way of doing such.  Both have to deal with research.  The pirate ship we looked on the internet but could not use that source so we went off the box and pictures provided.  This will be the same for the white paper project, if we cannot use a source we just have to be able to look for another.

All and all the pirate project is a mirror image of what needs to be done on the white paper project:  find what we need or research, organize it and use what we can, divide the tasks up, and then be able to combine them afterwards to make a sensible white paper.

--Aaron