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
Going into this assignment I was not sure what a white paper was. After watching the video on
canvas and going through the power point I learned that a white paper was an informational
document describing a problem and its solution. After figuring out what a white paper was, I had to
research a problem and come up with a solution about my book that I picked at the start of the
semester, which was Caves. After doing research I came up with the problem of cave pollution and
how it affects the cave and drinking water.

First Draft (for peer editing)

The first challenged I faced while working on the first draft was forgetting about the works cited or
reference page. After putting where I got the information from at the end of sentences, I did not put
the website in the reference page. After I was done with the entire first draft, I had to find the
websites again which took a while but thankfully I was able to find each website and post it in the
reference page. Another challenge I faced was switching between past and present tense; each
paragraph I was picking either past or present tense, so I had to go back to choose either past or
present tense for the whole paper.

Second Draft (for your packet)

The first challenge that I faced was that I did not complete my first draft. I left out the conclusion and
only posted the links to the websites that I used on the references page instead of using certain
format, such as MLA format. Doing this made me spend a copious amount of time on just this draft
but in the end it turned out well. The second challenge was Contents page. I started the contents
page and updated it after each section I completed. At the end of writing the paper I noticed that the
pages that told the reader where to look for each section were wrong. This was because I would go
back and make changes which would sometimes make a section go to another page. After a couple
edits, I managed to put the right page number for each section. The last challenge I faced was that I
wrote considerably more about the problem and not its solution, so I had to spend more time on the
solution. Overall, I felt pretty well about the second draft.

Final Draft (for your portfolio)

Looking over the comments made for my final draft, I learned that my abstract was too long, some of
my figures were not talked about in the paragraphs, and that I was not doing a good job of getting
my audience to follow my solution. After reading the comments I made sure to fix everything that
was mentioned for my final draft. I made my abstract one less paragraph, fixed a couple of spelling
and grammar mistakes, made sure to write about my figures in the paragraphs, and made sure that I
did my best to get my audience to “buy” into the solution.
Document Development Exposition: White Paper