Document Development Exposition: Recommendation Report

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
In planning for a recommendation report, I again struggled to decide on what to write. Deserts
aren’t usually the subject of memos of this sort, and I spent a week or more just trying to
figure out a way of incorporating them in a professional memo. After thinking about my
experiences with deserts and how I had toured them myself, I decided to write this report with
regards to desert tourism and encouraging tourism organizations to adopt policies that would
make it sustainable and environmentally friendly. I again looked to the UN for any related
organizations and surely enough, I found that there was a World Tourism Organization. I
decided to structure my memo beginning with the benefits that tourism brings to local
economies, followed by the issues it raises, followed by some recommendations of
sustainable means of tourism.

First Draft
Again, my first draft was lacking in content. I had managed to structure my header as well as
my outline from the planning stages, but I was only able to give an introduction to the memo.
In it I introduced the topics that would be discussed in the later sections such as “ecotourism.”
However, I still lacked a summary and I only had a few notes for what I would discuss in the
sections regarding desert tourism interference with ecosystems and sustainable means of
tourism. It was quite challenging to meet this word count especially for a subject like deserts.
As I spoke with my peers and looked for more information online, I utilized UN documents
as well as articles that focused on the effects of tourism on specific desert regions. This
information helped me shape my later drafts.

Second Draft
My second draft required some major additions and changes to my first draft. Because I had
only completed the introduction with some notes and ideas for what to include in latter
sections, I needed to find some significant sources to assist me in getting the right content in
terms of both quality and quantity. As I reflected on the diversity of desert environments,
their ecosystems, and the nations that host them, I decided to look for specific examples of
nations that have been affected by tourism. One writer, Ahmed Zedan, went into detail as to
how vital tourism was to Egypt’s economy and how some remote regions in Egypt had no
connections to the main cities until tourism took off. Other stories like those in Chile were
negative in totality. Some desert tourism groups in places like the UAE provided prime
examples of how they can be environmentally friendly in the future.

Final Draft
 Document Development Exposition: Recommendation Report
ENGL 2116 | Spring 2018

Once I had completed my second draft, my professor mentioned that there was relatively little
on which to improve. The biggest issues were those regarding spacing and reducing space
between headers, sub-headers, and paragraphs to make the overall memo easier to read. There
were a few minor wording issues that I sorted out promptly. Other than that, I really had little
to change. I did learn a lot throughout this entire process, however. While the word count was
also daunting for a professional memo regarding deserts, I found that there was enough
content from the diverse sources that I used. The use of modern-day articles as well as written
documentaries were excellent supplemental material to the conventional “Reaktion” book and
UN documents.