Research proposal reports

Technical communication involves more than just memos and notes. Our latest project found us collecting data and doing research for a proposal. Not only was the research and data collection a excercise in itself we found ourselves working in groups trying to compile all our different pieces of work into one cohesive document that was not only informative and appealing but also streamlined and free of excess filler information for our proposal.

We found it to be rather difficult to decide which information to use and where to use it and how it should be included. I was fortunate to have a hardworking easy going group of great classmates to work with on this project. Progressing through the research phase we found ourselves having to weed out the unnecessary information and limit the scope of our proposal. An unexpected problem, at least from my point was the difficulty and frustration with different formats of programs when uploading to our shared drive online. Our best solution was having one person compile everything and the rest submitting research and data that was collected.

borrowed from Burton Striping

In the end I feel like we were able to organize an appealing proposal of the University acquiring additional acreage next to campus. Personally in my research all of the people I visited or talked to on the phone or through email were happy to help. It was difficult to meld all our research into one document and then individually present portions of other people's work in ones own oral delivery.

Slides.com instead of Power Point

I tried out Slides.com for a presentation in Technical Writing and was pleased with the software / program. I was able to pick up on it with no instruction and make a basic slide presentation. I saved all my work online and was able to share a link to my presentation. This was nice but also my only concern as well. Is its possible to save my work and use it without internet service, I don't know however it is something that would be important to me in a real world application. It is sad to see that since I gave my presentation on stage management we have had 2 major disasters, one in China and one in Europe. It is nice to know that alternatives to power point are available if we just look and find them and this is probably not the last time I will use Slides.com.

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