12 December 2013

Dr. Leslie Bruce Department of English, Comparative Literature, and Linguistics California State University, Fullerton P.O. Box 34080 Fullerton, CA 92834-9480

Dear Dr. Bruce, The purpose of this letter is to present the documents contained in this portfolio so as to showcase my mastery of the student learning outcomes outlined in the course syllabus. The texts I included consist of emails that were exchanged between members of my group for the memo project, a peer review sheet I filled out for another groups instruction manual, and an instruction manual which I revised. I arranged these documents in order of increasing mastery to show my progress as a technical writer. Email correspondence between my memo group and I is the first document in the portfolio due to its informality and the fact that it was the first time we had to work in a group. I believe this demonstrates my mastery of half of SLO #1, writing informally out-of-class, SLO #3, and parts of SLO #6. While these emails are not the best display of my writing ability, as they were not in any way revised and thus contain some grammatical and typographical errors, they are an instance of my informal out-of-class writing. I feel like these emails are a good example of my mastery of SLO #3 as they are an instance when I had to organize my thoughts and communicate, sometimes persuasively, with my group to address the issue of how best to convince the Student Life Office that a magazine was right for them. These emails, and others like them, are how my group and I engaged in the pre-writing and drafting process and so are a good display of my mastery of part of SLO #6. I am not generally the best at working in groups, but this project helped me to improve on that. The second document in the portfolio is a peer review sheet my group and I filled out for another groups instruction manual. This assignment satisfies part of SLO #5 by showing my assessment and critique of another groups work. This assignment helped me by making me look for errors in the work of others. I was then able to look for similar mistakes in my own work and improve my writing. The final document in the portfolio is the instruction manual as it is the best example of my mastery of the student learning outcomes. This assignment satisfies SLOs #1, #2, #4, and #6. The instruction manual satisfies SLO #1 by illustrating my ability to write formally in-class and out-of-class as it was written both in and out of class. It meets SLO #2 due to the fact that it used information from an outside source which was cited as such. SLOs 4 and 6 were through the mere nature of a proper instruction manual. The instruction manual is a good display of my mastery of SLO #4 due to the fact that the language of the instruction manual had to be very

clear and concise and as with any good writing it is clear of sexist and xenophobic language. A mastery of SLO #6 is shown through the revisions I made to the instruction manual based upon your comments. This assignment forced me to be extremely concise which does not come naturally. Looking forward it is clear that I still need to work on my concision, but this assignment helped greatly.

Sincerely,

Joshua Cochran