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
As with the instructions, coming up with the initial topic was one of the harder parts. I had done a
bunch of research and read through the Reaktion book, but I needed some good problem/solution
topic. When I finally found some good sources to back up an idea, I went with it and the rest of the
planning went pretty smoothly. I don’t have a huge problem adding in good colors or text styles that
look nice, I think. Here I learned how to take a lot of information about a topic and turn it into a
usable topic.

First Draft (for peer editing)

The first draft was difficult, although not having to entirely reach the word limit on the first one
helped. I think I spent way too much time trying to format a good title slide, but in the end I think it
worked out for me. I am generally good at writing essays so getting the information into the
document wasn’t too bad. The hardest part here was organizing and structuring it to fit the prompt
and format needed. I learned here the proper format of a white paper and how to write with the
correct language for a white paper.

Second Draft (for your packet)

The second draft is where I went in and added quotes, fixed sentences, added information and
pictures, and overall took the document from a decent draft to a final product. I think the hardest
part of the second draft was the fine tuning. Of course, with my first draft I was allowed to make
more mistakes, but this one was worth more and required more time to get to a good point. I
learned how to better go from the rough stage to the final product that can be turned in, although in
real world scenarios, it would be something that is released or sent to be published, so definitely still
need more work in the fine-tuning stage.

Final Draft (for your portfolio)

The final draft was hard. What I thought was a good paper needed some pretty heavy editing.
Although the information was all there, it needed better organization and flow, and more focus on a
specific problem and solution. My focus on the final draft was to reorganize the information, take out
what was unnecessary, and add in sentences here and there to point the reader in the right direction
and say what is meant to be portrayed. I learned that a big part of writing is portraying the right
message to all readers, so even though I thought the problem and solution were clear, they weren’t,
and needed to be fixed.