Document Development Exposition: White Paper

ENGL 2116

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

Planning
This was the first assignment due in English 2116. This proved to be an uphill challenge
because we only had a day and a half to complete the assignment in order to have it ready for
other students to peer review. Some of the challenges I faced while writing this paper were
lack of interest in being forced to write a paper, which is something I have always loathed and
made it a point not to corner myself educationally into a spot where that would be a part of
what I was doing, hence being a computer science major. I overcame this by reading through
my assigned book and finding small bits of information in which I could incorporate into my
paper.

First Draft (for peer editing)

The first thing I did to get ready for my initial draft was set up my document to have all the
appropriate headings that were called for by the rubric. This way I would be able to keep
track of what I had to write and keep my thoughts on a linear track toward completion. I
began by creating a title page with an image. I then created a table of contents with all the
headings that I had already incorporated into the document. Then came the process of writing
the body of the abstract. After that was done I began writing the body for the first subheading.
Once I felt I had enough information, I moved onto the second subheading, and then the third.
After completing that I implemented images to enhance paragraphs and then had to write my
conclusion. Then it was ready for peer review.

Second Draft (for your packet)

My peer review came back very positive. Some of the feedback that I got to revise was to change
some of the words I used to simplifier words. A word like zeitgeist was replaced with social influence
for example. Because the peer reviewer noted that all the images added would need captions I
decided that I would remove the images since they were not necessary to begin with and were just
style choices to help break up the text. Also noted on the peer review were some of the text seemed
to change background color for no apparent reason. I isolated the text in question and made it
conform to the styling of the rest of the text in the paper. Because the peer review had turned out
positive with no critiques in regard to content as it applied to the rubric, I felt this paper was now
acceptable to turn in.

Final Draft (for your portfolio)

This was the beginning of the biggest challenge I faced in this class. There would evidently
be no reason why we were peer reviewing these papers as the findings of that peer review
would not be examined by the rubric. I turned off the track changes feature that had
accidently been implemented into my packets submission thus allowing only the changes
made to the final packet viewable. Examining the revisions requested by the teacher, I turned
on the track changes feature again and removed colloquialisms and rhetorical questions I had
prepositioned to the reader. I added a citation to support a claim that was made in the “Health
 Document Development Exposition: White Paper
ENGL 2116

Concerns” section of the paper as requested by the teacher. The lesson I learned is that I am
still really terrible at writing long form, forced essays, on short notice.