English 421: Technical Writing

Building the pirate ship is a good exercise and it is especially fun to do in an english class.  It is also a good exercise because it has a purpose behind it.  It was interesting to see how everyone decided to go about building the model.  It seemed like everyone wanted to do the same thing.  Put the instructions together, put them in an order that made sense, and construct the model.  This is very relevant to the process that we use to write in class.  We kind of throw everything together, organize it, and then post our writing.  It is also relevant to how we will be writing our white papers.  We will have to make a decision on how to divide the work, collaborate, and revise our work.  It sounds kind of stupid, but you can think of the parts of the pirate ship as being words and you have to arrange them in a way that makes sense and creates something meaningful in the end.  The process of collaborating as a group is basically the same, whether you are talking about building a pirate ship or writing a paper you interact with group members in a similar fashion.  

Cody