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 assignment was relatively easy to plan out, but I knew the entire paper was going to take a very
long amount of time to do. Since the paper was going to be very long, I tried to go with a relatively
broad topic that I knew I could find a lot of information on. It was pretty easy to fill out a very generic
outline, and I went ahead and included specific heading titles that related to my problem and
solution so that it would be easier to develop research. The style guide was also a good bit easier to
fill out since I had already had experience with the design of the instructions.

First Draft (for peer editing)

I was pretty busy during the week that the white paper was due, so I tried not to worry about the
first revision so much since I knew I could get some really good peer recommendations on what
exactly needed to be improved. I went ahead and tried to format the final design how I wanted it
and I gave a pretty good direction for each section, but I did not fully develop the ideas so that I
could receive instruction on the best way to fully develop these ideas.

Second Draft (for your packet)

I put a lot of effort into cleaning up the final draft of my white paper, but I was really busy this week
so I do not think I had the time to fully develop my research as I would have liked to. Fortunately,
since I had chosen a pretty broad topic, I was able to finish up my white paper with the information I
had already researched. The main thing I had to complete for my final revision was adding figures
and cleaning up the overall formatting and references. I did not have a very difficult time finishing up
the revisions and I was able to turn in a paper that I was quite proud of.

Final Draft (for your portfolio)

My portfolio revision did not need a whole lot of major revisions. The main thing was that I was
instructed to re-organize the overall structure a little bit to more closely follow the format of a
standard white paper. I thought it was pretty difficult to decide how exactly it should be re-
organized, but I ultimately decided that some portions of some of my sections needed to be re-
worded to more clearly show my purpose in including those sections. Overall, the white paper was
able to teach me a lot about writing a formal report on a topic that I had to research.