English 421: Technical Writing

When you first look at a model pirate ship, you might never think that there is a relationship between building the model and writing a group paper. In English 421, anything is possible. Believe it or not, there are many similarities between the two. First, and probably the most obvious, is that we are working in groups for the project and we are all working together to get this model built. One might say that this is a team building skill to help us when we break up into our smaller groups. Another comparison is with the main base parts of the ship. We were only given parts of the directions for the ship and even those directions were out of order. The out of order directions represent ideas for a rough draft. Before the paper is written, there is no structure, just a bunch of ideas floating around in your head. Completing the base parts of the ship represent putting all of the ideas together into a rough draft, and even though it is not finished, it is something to build off of. When more parts are added, the structure of both the ship and the paper become stronger begin to take shape of the final draft/ship. This is what I think of when I am comparing the pirate ship that we are building in class to the white paper project.