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
For the planning of the White Paper, I needed to write something that correlates with my reaktion
book topic, which was water. I also needed to write about something that wasn’t so broad, like the
oceans for example. This was a huge challenge for me, because narrowing it down enough was very
tough and I had to think of something that wasn’t so broad and something that was a problem
relating to water while also making sure the problem is solvable in some way. I decided to do my
research of water related problems around the world and landed on making my white paper around
the Ugandan Water Crisis while representing the Planet Water Foundation. The other thing that was
hard for my planning process was finding good sources to use for building up my white paper which
was quite difficult. There are many different countries suffering in Africa like Uganda for example, so
it was quite difficult for me to find what I needed Uganda specifically. Eventually, after hours of
research and reading, I was able to procure a good amount of information and sources to planning
out how I wanted the white paper to look like regarding the problems, solutions and how my
solutions help solve the problem. What I learned from all this is that if you’re looking for something
that isn’t broad to write about, it can be hard to find what you need, so this taught me a lot about
time management and what I should do with the time I have in order to accomplish the things I need
to do.

First Draft (for peer editing)

For peer editing, my peers overall deemed my first draft quite good, but suggested a few things. They
suggested to increase font sizes a little for headings and decrease spacing within the document. They
felt like the headings should be emphasized more so increasing the sizes would make them stand out
and the spacing between the headings and paragraphs are way too spaced out and left a lot of
empty and negative space. Overcoming the challenges won’t be hard as they are simple tweaks
within the document and all I have to do is reduce some spacing and make some headings a little
bigger. What I learned with the peer editing here was to make sure my document is not
overwhelmingly spaced out and to make sure my headings are little bit larger than my subheadings
and body text.

Second Draft (for your packet)

Going into the second draft, I made sure to incorporate the suggestions that were given to me by my
peers. These challenges were very minor and all I had to do was follow what they suggested, which
was just resizing some fonts for headings and decreasing the spacing throughout the document, so
the document was not so spaced out. One thing that I wanted to add onto my second draft was to
give my abstract a lot more depth which I felt was lacking. It was quite a challenge because there was
already so much in the white paper that I have written and incorporating a lot more of that and
condensing it within the abstract would take some time and a good amount of effort. How I
overcame this was by taking each necessary and important piece of information from each heading
and subheading sections and incorporating it in the abstract. By doing this I would be able to make
whoever reads the abstract become more informed about what the whole white paper was about. I
also had to make sure it flowed well because there were so many different pieces of information
within the abstract, so I didn’t want to confuse or overwhelm the reader. What I learned from
incorporating suggestions and adding more to the abstract was that the more work and detail you
 Document Development Exposition: White Paper

put in, the better the document or project comes out. It’s these little things that make the difference
in writing when you look at it in a bigger scale. I want to make sure that whoever views the
document gets the best experience possible when looking through it, so I want to provide clarity and
enough details to make sure they don’t get confused or feel that there should’ve been more for
something within the document.

Final Draft (for your portfolio)

For the final draft, there were a quite a few challenges I needed to overcome from the feedback I
received from my instructor. For starters, I needed to remove the floating text boxes throughout my
document, so I made sure to remove the fill within the text boxes, so they were just the hyperlink
text you click that brings you to each source individually. Since my abstract was long enough to be
called an executive summary, I simply replaced abstract with executive summary so it would fit more
within the document. For under each heading, I needed to have a few sentences under them, so I
essentially wrote a couple of sentences under each heading, making a sort of overview of what’s to
come regarding the subheadings when you read the sentences under the heading. To avoid floating
boxes for figures, I put light blue rectangles behind the figures to give them more emphasis and to
make them take more space and not make them seem like floating boxes. I also expanded the
images so people could look at them better. While I did label and describe the figures I provided, I
had to reference them within the paragraphs that correlate with each one, so what I did was related
the contents of the paragraphs I wrote for the subheadings to the figure so that way there is a good
correlation between the figure and the information provided before the figure is shown, that way
there is a better connection between the paragraphs and images provided. The last challenge was to
avoid using “in conclusion” in the conclusion heading. I replaced “In conclusion” with “To address
these challenges and to pave the way for positive changes” to make a better “call to action” type
feeling when concluding the white paper. What I learned from doing all of these revisions is the
amount of detail I missed out on putting in my white paper and the proper techniques that should be
used when creating a white paper, such as referencing figures and to avoid floating boxes.