Document Development Exposition: White Paper

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

Planning
This paper was the hardest and longest paper I had to write for this class which in turn, came with a
lot of planning. During the planning stage, I began to collect sources for the eventual white paper
and came up with the basic structure (Background->Problem->Solution) I wanted to use. My topic
was on tsunamis, and I knew I wanted to research and talk about tsunamis in Japan, so I used Japan’s
struggles and eventual rebuilding from the major 2011 tsunami to talk about how that process could
happen in the US and how to avoid it. I also planned on using the National oceanic and atmospheric
administration (NOAA) as the company/organization to petition/argue my solution to.

First Draft (for peer editing)

I spent many hours working on the first draft (much more than the other two assignments) which
ended up leaving me with minimal revisions for the second and final draft. Much of this time was
used researching and formatting my topic to fit the structure I wanted in the planning. Luckily, the
examples given in class mostly fit my topic and implementation, so I modeled my White Paper off
those to get the overall design seen in my final draft. I formatted and got the resources for
everything in planning phase, so actually writing the draft was straight forward, it just took a while
because of the number of paragraphs and words necessary to explain tsunamis and their
problems/solutions.

Second Draft (for your packet)

The second draft had very minimal changes because of how much time I spent on the first draft, and
based on my partners revisions, I believe they thought so too. It included minor grammar revisions,
formatting revisions, and probably most importantly, image revisions. I increased the size and
formatted many of the images along with adding text under to explain them. Overall, however, not
much was changed from first draft.

Final Draft (for your portfolio)

Like the second draft, I did not have many revisions for the final either. Minor spelling and formatting
changes, but the biggest things I fixed were changing the paragraphs to block style and referencing
the figures in the paragraphs. I also changed the size of the images to better read the text. Again,
since I spent so much time on the first draft, my changes here were minimal, and I was very happy
with the result.