Dr.

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

Dear Dr. Bruce,

Since the beginning of the semester, it has been your goal to improve our technical and

professional writing skills. These skills were sharpened through class lectures, group exercises,

and finally the iFixit project. Through these assignments, we were slowly achieving the student

learning outcomes (SLO’s) that you had laid out in the beginning of the semester, SLO’s

including: rhetorical focus, ethical citation, organization, collaboration, and language and design.

The purpose of this letter is to present work that best demonstrates my improvements throughout

the semester. The documents I have chosen to display are an original and a revised version of my

progress report, along with my group’s team charter. Each paragraph will briefly address the

importance of each document and its impact on my technical and professional writing.

The revised version of my progress report is presented first because it covers nearly all the

SLO’s required, including rhetorical focus, organization, collaboration, and language and design.

Rhetorical focus was a large factor in my progress report since there were two different

audiences that needed to be addressed. In order to best inform my audience, all outlining,

prewriting, and condensing of information had to be geared towards meeting the needs of not

only my boss, who needs to know the status of the project, but also informing my professor of

my technical writing skills thus far. This is best exemplified in the “Problems Encountered”

section of the progress report which briefly informs you of setbacks in the project and how these

issues have been resolved the group. This paragraph addresses issues that our boss would need to
know and displays our group’s professionalism and how our group practices collaboration to our

teacher. The “Conclusion” also invites your input as to further improve the project. This

document also displays organization skills in the way each element of the project was addressed

in separate, chronological paragraphs which are differentiated through headings. A first draft of

this document was given to my group-mates to peer edit, and with their collaboration I was able

to condense the language in my paragraphs as to articulate its contents more efficiently. Some

other suggestions my group-mates made were to make the headings bolder to help readers

differentiate paragraphs, which you can see in my final draft. This change also contributed to the

document’s design and overall professional credibility. Designed in a business letter format, the

document is written objectively and keeps details brief and concise, as to keep the audience

informed without cluttering the document with irrelevancies.

Presented next is my group’s team charter which was written at the very start of the iFixit

project, as a way of outlining group guidelines and expectations. Like the progress report, the

team charter satisfies the rhetorical focus, organization, collaboration, and language and design

SLO’s, as well as the ethical citation SLO. Rhetorical focus is best exemplified in the way the

team charter is addressed to you and is written to both inform and persuade you of our group’s

ability to work together professionally and unsupervised. Before the document was written, our

team came together and reached a consensus before putting our ideas into one, coherent team

charter. Next, the document was organized by topics and sub topics which were distinguishable

through headings and designed to be evenly spaced out, as to assist readers in navigating through

the document. Once we had finished discussing our ideas, we split the assignment up among the

four of us and the final piece is a collaboration of all of our writing and management abilities.
Like most of the assignments in the iFixit project, clear and professional language had to be

implemented as to persuade our audience of our group’s professional credibility and had to be

designed in a way that was easy to follow. For example, ideas were listed out in bullet-point

form as to help readers quickly find the information they need. Finally, ethical citations are

abundant throughout the charter with a citation present in almost every paragraph, giving credit

to the sources used by our group.

The work I have put in this semester has proven to be very beneficial towards sharpening my

technical writing skills and I hope that these writing pieces best reflect that improvement. If you

have any questions or comments concerning this portfolio, please feel free to contact me as to

help me further grow as a writer.

Respectfully,

Aimee Jurado