Progress Report 6/19/08

Introduction
I am writing a proposal for what I hope will become my master's thesis. I want to study the Net Generation's communication styles, specifically the ways they express themselves online. I am interested in seeing if this generation distinguishes between formal and informal communication. The study will involve analyzing online writing samples of the Net Generation and sharing them with people in other generations to learn from their feedback. This should give me insight on the way new technology changes the way we communicate and how these changes affect intergenerational exchanges.

Work Completed
This week was focused on editing the proposal. Since my project plan section needed the most work, I spent some time on Monday rewriting it in paragraph form and updating the method. My plan has changed quite a bit from when I first started. I also thought about style and made a style sheet, which I posted here. On Wednesday we worked on some front matter, and I made a letter of transmittal and a title page. We're doing presentations for the class today. For mine I used the screen capture program, Jing, to record a facebook profile. I talked about different parts of it as I scrolled through.

Next Steps
I need to edit the writing of the proposal quite a bit and then move it to InDesign to add the style features I've thought about. I also want to improve my presentation if I have time. Then I'll need to write a report documenting the what, how, and why of all the decisions I've made. I'll package the final deliverables and turn them in by 9 am on Monday.

Conclusion
I have a busy weekend ahead. I'm glad we have a couple of extra days to work on everything, because I doubt I would have been able to get everything done by tomorrow. I'm glad that I have rough drafts of my proposal and my presentation done, but I still think each of them needs a lot of work. Writing the report will probably be the most time-consuming project I have to work on, since I haven't even started it yet. If I explain each decision I made in detail, I think it will probably come to ten pages, but I'm going to try to be concise and keep it shorter in the interest of time. It's hard to believe this class is almost over. It's only been a few weeks, but I feel like I've accomplished a lot in this short amount of time.