Document Development Exposition: White Paper

ENGL 2116 | Spring 2018

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

Planning
During planning, my primary challenge was identifying audiences properly. I kind of
misunderstood the audience in my planning document, as I put parents and teachers as the
primary audience, though as I wrote the paper it became clearer that my audience was
those who have the ability to implement my awareness solution, rather than those who
would be targeted by it. I was happy with my outline, areas for explanation, and visual aids. I
learned to consider my exact subject and writing topic more precisely to identify the
audience accurately.

First Draft
My first draft came along quite nicely, though I did not have a few crucial key aspects. The
biggest challenge when writing this was identifying which information was relevant and
which information should be discarded. I found a lot of sources with tons of information
about lightning injury types, studies of lightning deaths historically. Particularly, a study
about lightning deaths by country was interesting as it focused in some areas about how
much more vulnerable third world countries are due to their high number of rural citizens
and primary workforce of farmers and other outdoor trades. I learned to better select the
most critical and relevant pieces of information, as I chose to focus on first world countries.

Second Draft
Thanks to my peer review, I was able to identify a few key elements by first draft was
missing. I forgot to include references and citations, most notably. I also some formatting
issues, including different heading levels that were too similar in size and style and some
spacing issues. I also expanded in a few sections as my paper was too short. Overall, these
edits were not particularly challenging, though I did get some more practice with MLA
citations and formatting documents correctly in Word.

Final Draft
For my final draft, I moved part of my introduction into my abstract and changed it to an
executive summary. I also added a section about the limitations of a public awareness
campaign, which essentially boils down to the fact that humans in general are unreliable and
inconsistent. Again, these edits were not particularly challenging, though I was able to
consider some more about the effectiveness of public awareness campaigns, which are quite
a common solution.