Spence's blog

Attached is Group 4's white paper. We chose to write our paper to Apple Inc with the intention of informing them how Google Docs would be a great benefit to them. Please make suggestions or edits as you see fit in order to increase the effectiveness of our paper.

Thank You,
Justine Roemer
Michael Shevlin
Ryan Spence

This week our group determined that we would write our white paper on Google Docs and how Apple would benefit from implementing the service. During the week we did some research and then posted the links and why they were good for our topic as well as how they would be incorporated into the paper. We also met and made a basic outline for the paper and divided out the work and discussed each section to give each member a good starting point. We then went our separate ways and worked on each of our sections and then met again and put all of the sections together.

After reading all of the required reading I have learned a large amount about what a white paper is. From what I have gathered a white paper’s purpose is to inform the readers about a particular product or service and to discuss the positive attributes and show how the product or service can meet the customer’s needs and solve their problem.

We started an email exchange and have discussed the project.

I am not sure what we are supposed to say here. I wrote my resume and cover letter for the same position as in my T-Letter. I tried to follow the guidelines that were laid out for us. Feel free to critique, comment, or criticize but please be kind!

I found my job posting on an internal database for United Technologies. I have never dealt with a T-Letter before so it took some time to word and layout everything the way I wanted. I am not entirely convinced that I would actually send something like this out to a company. I understand the point of the document but I don’t really see its effectiveness. I think it serves the same point as a cover letter and resume but only provides slight advantages while, I think, it has a major draw back.

I think the OWL readings on cover letters were very good.

First off, I think the entire resume lesson is much better off after all of the reading has been done. I like that there were several different sources with different views that we can draw on and use to try to design our resume. In the end I think today was a very informational day in learning the fine details that should and should not be included. I really liked how the first two readings explained the thought process the reviewers go through and which sections they review and what is going through their mind.

For my usability test of my oil change instructions I gave them to both my parents and my friend. My friend was actually one of the guys that taught me how to change oil. He read through the instructions and didn’t make any information suggestions or changes just noticed a few grammatical errors. At this point I was pretty excited because I thought I had written some pretty good instructions but I soon found out I was wrong. Next I gave them to my parents who have minimal to no oil change experience and they found many more problems.

I liked that chapter 24 emphasized the influence visuals can have on your writing. I was surprised to see that they covered as many different types of visuals with such little explanation but that seems to be a recurring theme with this book. One thing I did learn that I had never thought about before was citing pictures or any visual that you use. When I think about it the idea seems quite obvious but I had never really put much thought into properly using visuals from other places. I thought chapter 25 was very informative.