Dr.

Leslie Bruce
University Hall room 435
800 N. State College Boulevard
Fullerton, CA. 92831

Dear Dr. Bruce,

At the beginning of the semester, I was not a very confident writer and had anxiety
whenever I needed to write essays. As the course progressed and we engaged in different in class
activities, I learned the six student learning objectives (SLO). In this letter, I will show evidence
of my use of SLO’s and the improvements that I have made over the course of the semester with
five documents. These documents include my definition essay, one annotated bibliography
synthesis on Educational Disparities, two scholar’s notebooks, and a team charter.
The team charter assignment required that, as a team, we collaborate our thoughts clearly
so that we could assess and critique each other’s ideas for our Annotated Bibliography. We did
this by creating sections of our goals. We needed to also use the SLO of organization and focus
to obtain an appropriate organizational pattern. This was shown by our consistency in the way
we set up the charter by adding sections such as “timesheet of our milestones”.
In the annotated bibliography (AB) on educational disparities we needed to collaborate
as a team and learn how to properly synthesize our resources with each other as well as persuade
readers of our credibility by citing the author in our annotations. These resources needed to have
ethical research done on the annotations and the proper citation of APA which is shown in the
document.
For the definition essay, I demonstrated my use of rhetorical focus from the SLO’s. I
focused on creating a Wikipedia page on the topic of polarity so that a specific audience of
students, parents, and educators could clearly understand the topic without feeling overwhelmed
with technical terms. This also required the use of the SLO academic language and design
because I needed to ensure that my essay did not come off as condescending. I needed to
implement a specific design of my essay that would attract the reader and encourage them to read
more. I did this by putting images in proximity to what I am talking about.
Next were my scholar’s notebook one and two, which focuses on ethical research,
organization, and focus. The first scholar’s notebook emphasizes organization and focus on the
definition essay. I used a cluster to help me focus on what specifically about polarity I wanted to
talk about and used it to create an organizational pattern for me to follow as I wrote.
For my second scholar’s notebook I focused on ethical research by analyzing Xu, et. al’s
article uORF-mediated translation allowing engineered plants to resist disease and how Cross
made his article more accessible to a broader audience by demonstrating ethical research.
 Over the course of this English 363 class, I have learned a lot of new skills to improve
my scientific writing and will carry this knowledge as I continue my journey through my science
career, such as applying it to poster presentations, thesis writing, and for finding jobs in the
future.

Sincerely,
Katie Van Gorder