As you're moving from a preliminary Draft 1 to a more polished Draft 2 of your white paper, here are some things to consider, if you haven't done so already: 

Target audiences

Your white paper’s readers will generally fall into one – or perhaps more than one – of the following categories:

• Readers seeking information.
• Readers serving as decision-makers, who are gathering resources to influence/support their decisions.
• Readers doing research on behalf of decision-makers, who gather resources to forward to decision-makers and/or who interpret information presented by resources in making recommendations to decision-makers.
• Readers in one or more of the above categories who are accessing several white papers on your topic, in order to gauge current discussion/trends.

Readers in any of these categories might know next to nothing about your subject matter – or might know quite a bit – so it’s important to do some background research on your target audience, its knowledge of your subject matter and/or connections between it and issues with which they’re highly familiar (such as workplace communication), and what they might do with the information after they’ve read your white paper.

Rhetorical strategies/goals

It’s not a guarantee that your readers will take the actions, or adopt the stances, that your white paper advocates. But if you apply the following suggestions, your readers will at the very least learn from, and respect, the knowledge and ideas that your white paper presents.

• Present and further your position throughout the paper – not just at the beginning and at the end.
• Identify – directly or indirectly – your target audience. Vocabulary, tone, examples, and analysis help accomplish this goal.
• Establish credibility and sincerity early and often throughout your white paper. With this in mind, see the next three suggestions.
• Always, always…come across as if you know what you’re talking about! If your subject matter involves ideas/issues/technologies about which you’re not especially knowledgeable, do some background/additional research and learn.
• Avoid using overly “gimmicky” approaches – these tend to leave readers wondering what you’ve left out because you’re hiding something and/or you’re too lazy to properly address an issue that needs to be addressed within your paper.
• Use research-based information from balanced and varied sources. I strongly encourage you to incorporate at least a few sources from some of the categories we discussed last week: general and tech-specific news sources, tech-based columns, open-source-related sites, websites from professional organizations (good for discussion of audience-related approaches to open source technologies), blogs, discussion lists, and podcasts/webcasts.
• Connect research-based information to your position and to issues/events about which your target audience is knowledgeable/interested/concerned.
• When using multiple sources, “introduce” the source and his/her credentials and relevance to your topic before quoted or paraphrased material. It’s essential that your readers are able to keep track of who’s “talking” – and of whether ideas presented are those of the writers or of the source(s).
• Use analogies when appropriate – but do so only occasionally, or else such attention-getters and voice-establishers lose their impact.
• Relate your discussion’s content/viewpoints to its apparent “place” within a larger and broader discussion about the topic.
• IMPORTANT: If the sources seem to "disagree" with your position, or with each other, incorporate this into your white paper through discussion/analysis. Don't ignore it, thinking that you don't have time, or don't know how, to address it. Remember, audiences access white papers to learn more about a topic, to make decisions, and to compare/contrast current attitudes/approaches. If an issue is being vigorously debated, your reader deserves to know this and to have access to discussion of these multiple perspectives.