Document Development Exposition: White Paper

ENGL 2116 | Spring 2018

Explain in detail your document’s development from planning to finish, describing your
challenges, how you overcame them, and what you learned.

Planning
In planning this assignment, I was initially confused as to what to write about. The required
word count seemed daunting, and I was struggling to find a suitable topic to write about
involving deserts. I began by looking for potential organizations that may have something to
do with the desert at all. As such, I turned to the global sources and found that the UN had its
own division for the protection of environments around the world. The UN Environment
Programme gave me the idea to write about desert environments and how one could pursue
efforts to protect them. After examining my “Reaktion” book, I found that there were many
examples of desert exploitation with few solutions being implemented. As such, I planned to
follow that and come up with some solutions of my own. The implementation of visuals,
headers, sub-headers, and other formatting followed conventional means as suggested by our
class textbook.

First Draft
My first draft for this assignment was largely incomplete. The main part that I was able to
finish was my abstract. In it, I discussed the previous misconceptions that people had
regarding deserts not being exploitable and the various forms of exploitation that take place in
it today. I ended up with a lengthy abstract that was more of an executive summary.
Regarding the other components of the white paper, I essentially copied and pasted my
bulleted outline that I had made in my planning sheet. In it, I discussed the different forms of
exploitation, the effects on plants, animals, and humans, and past solutions that had been
attempted to solve various problems caused by exploitations like desertification. My outline
continued with my proposed solutions and conclusions. I found this a bit challenging due to
how few solutions had worked thus far.

Second Draft
In this stage, I proceeded to turn my bulleted outline into a concrete set of paragraphs. I
incorporated visuals that outlined the problems accordingly and developed a title page with a
diverse set of images of the various types of deserts in existence. It was challenging
expanding all of these bullet points to the point of meeting the word count. However, I found
that after looking for other sources of information like those provided by Atkins Library’s
expansive databases, there were many sites that gave me historical examples of desert
exploitation and attempted solutions to them in the past. Using those along with my
“Reaktion” book and the UN Environment Programme sources, I was able to amass enough
information to complete my second draft. After some heavy formatting of what I wrote and of
my citations, I was able to complete the paper accordingly.

Final Draft
 Document Development Exposition: White Paper
ENGL 2116 | Spring 2018

My final draft required little modification as indicated by my professor’s comments. I mainly

addressed the issues regarding my abstract and the past attempted solutions to the problems of
desert exploitation. Regarding the former, my professor stated that because of its length, my
abstract was more of an executive summary. As such, I included a brief overview of what
possible solutions there were at the end of it. In the solutions sections, I elaborated on why
human activities with minimal impact should be pursued and how they would benefit the
environments and humanity. Finally, I had some minor formatting issues to address which
consisted of moving the sub-headers closer to the paragraphs that followed them. There
weren’t many challenges in this stage of my white paper.