Document Development Exposition: Instructions and Usability Test Script

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

White Paper DDE

Parker Groat

Planning
The planning for this packet was probably the most difficult out of all the projects from this semester.
The instructions for this seemed a little unclear when I first read them over and this made it challenging
to plan out a good outline. For the white paper assignment, the topic that I focused on was the harsh
mining issues and possibility of a good shortage. This revolved around the idea that mining, especially
gold mining is become a lot harsher as there isn’t a lot of natural gold left around the world to be mined.
With this being the case and the available gold being in extremely hard locations to mine, such as deep
mines with limited oxygen and high operation costs, to deep ocean deposits that would cost too much
to operate. Since the demand of gold is increasing as many new technologies require the use of the
precious ore the question became will there ever be a gold shortage. For this assignment I thought that
for planning a brief background history on gold would appropriate, along with the beginning of the gold
rush here in the United States, then modern methods and the difficulties around the harsh conditions,
and then is there really a gold shortage or will there ever be one. Getting all this in the packet was going
to be difficult and looking back I should have planned a little better and become more organized as there
is some unnecessary information in the second draft.

First Draft (for peer editing)

The first draft of the white paper packet had all the challenges that I taught it was going to have, there
isn’t a lot of information on gold shortages mainly because it was discovered that there is no gold
shortage, especially not in our lifetime. Gold production peaked in 2018 I believe and has been slowly
decreasing each year, but only by around 1% each year and the rate of production is still high enough to
never experience a shortage. In modern times there are also new companies that are investing in
recycling the natural resource as it is one of the only natural resources that can be reused. Companies
are finding the gold in smartphones and other high-end technologies that aren’t being used anymore
but there is a small amount of gold in each that can be extracted and recycled into a new product. With
there being no real issue with gold shortage it made it hard to go with the initial plan, so instead I
focused on the environmental issues with gold mining. Unlike the possibility of a gold shortage there
was a lot of information on gold mining environmental issues. When I started to write the first draft the
first thing, I did was type up the abstract that talked about the amount of gold ore extracted each year
and how much gold is estimated to be left to mine. After this I did the History of Gold which touched on
what the first uses were and when it became desirable. Next was the transition for old mining to
modern mining and how modern mining presents a lot of health and environmental issues.
 Document Development Exposition: Instructions and Usability Test Script

Second Draft (for your packet)

For the second draft not much was changed, the assignment seemed to be in a good order and the peer
reviews that I received didn’t point out any dramatic changes that needed to be made. There were a
couple made around the idea of changing some images, some fonts throughout the assignment weren’t
the same, and some grammatical errors, recommendation to add more spacing between the titles and
bodies along with making the document double space, and the biggest adding a section talking more
about the solution to the problem and how it affects the gold mining industry. These issues weren’t all
resolved, I went through and did most of them but missed some and forgot some of the suggestions that
were made when finishing the second draft. The biggest error that I didn’t correct was adding a proper
solutions section and focusing more on the problem, solution, and how the solution solves the problem.
This will be the focus of my final draft and the biggest challenge will be reducing the text down, which
with this being for a specific audience I think that reducing the abstract and removing the large section
and the background of gold is beneficial.

Final Draft (for your portfolio)

After reading over all the feedback it is apparent that many of the issues mentioned in the peer review
are the same issues needing to be resolved. The biggest change that needs to be made and will be the
most challenging is breaking it down and keeping it to the three main bodies of the white paper. The
first being the problem, to do this I will first go back and really think about the main problem. Which for
this is the environmental impacts that come along with gold mining. For this section it has to be clear
what the problem is, without a lot of information and fine details. After this the second section is the
solution which can be presented in a bare bones’ manner. The third section will expand of the second
section and talk about how the solution fixes the problem. For this section more detail should be used.
Outside of this I need to move some sections around and reduce some, the first thing will be reducing
the abstract down to only two small paragraphs. Which is supposed to give a nice overview of the whole
paper. For this I think I will also take some information presented in the background of gold mining and
mix it in before removing that as it is not one of the three bodies needed. The next section which is
currently Modern-Day mining difficulties can stay as the beginning of the problem, where I will touch on
some of the difficulties around mining and what processes are being used. From these processes many
of the environmental issues will be presented and the problem will be presented. With this the
environmental issues section can be added and make one larger body with some appropriate headings
and subheadings with consistency throughout. The solution section is good and will be changed a little
but in a good spot. After this some parts of the solution will be moved and a main body around how the
solutions presented will fix the problem will be added. With all these changes the article will be in a
much better spot and achieve the overall goal of the white paper packet.