7 December 2015

Dr. Leslie Bruce

Department of English, Comparative Literature, and Linguistics
Room: UH-435
California State University, Fullerton
P.O. Box 34080
Fullerton, CA 92834-9480
Dear Dr. Bruce,
This letter is being written to you to present my portfolio of documents that complete your
Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) for the class. I have decided to go with six documents in
my portfolio, these documents are this cover letter, the peer review of my original editorial, the
original editorial with your remarks on it, the revised editorial, and two Writers Notebook
entries. I will explain how each of these documents in my portfolio complete the SLOs and
helped me improve my writing.
The first document is this cover letter, which helped me complete a few SLOs which are the 1st,
2nd, and 3rd one. The reason it satisfied the first SLO is because this is a formally written
document for an audience which would be you professor, and the purpose is to describe to why
each of my documents complete certain SLOs. The second SLO is satisfied because the
language used in this cover letter is meant to be formal since it is in the style of a letter. The third
SLO is satisfied because the other purpose of this cover letter is to persuade you that I was able
to complete all of the SLOs.
The second document in my portfolio is the peer review of my original editorial which completes
the 6th SLO. The peer review satisfied this SLO because it allowed for collaboration on my
editorial since a classmate was able to tell me what they thought I could improve on in my
persuasive paper. This really helped me as a writer since sometimes I can overlook certain key
aspects of a paper that can really help get my point across better and faster and it really helps for
another individual to look at your paper and be able to tell that to you. A good example is that the
person who did my peer review put is Paragraph transitions need some work. Paper was well
organized but some parts were a little vague, including more specific data, and comments on it
would help.
The third document is my actual editorial with your comments on it, this particular document
completes quite a few SLOs such as the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and the 4th one. The editorial has a rhetorical
focus since it is talking to an audience of beachgoers about beach quality and how testing should
improve to help the general public. The purpose of the editorial was to inform the audience about
how insufficient the testing of bacterial pathogens in the ocean and to spread awareness about
how it should improve, this is how it satisfies the first SLO. The second SLO is completed by

always citing if a direct quote was used from a source and also including a works cited list at the
end of the paper, a good example would be As of right now beach authorities do test the
beaches after rainfall to see if the beach is safe enough to be in but the precautions that they
make might not be enough. After rainfall, authorities only issue a 3-day warning to beachgoers,
but there are legislators that say it should be raised to 5 days. (Barboza, 2015).
The last document is the revised editorial, which like the original editorial completes the first
four SLOs. The 3rd SLO is completed because this editorial is made to persuade the audience to
push for better testing and to understand that if the beach quality is not good enough to swim
then a longer warning should be issued or the beach should be closed off completely. A good
example of this would be, the reason they are arguing that the warning should be extended up to
5 days is because research is starting to show that the pathogens that are brought after rainfall
remain for more than 3 days (Barboza, 2015). This fourth SLO is completed because I had to
organize all my thoughts and data in a nice flow on this editorial. I had to present the problem
and explain how it could be made better and persuade the audience of why I am making a good
point. This revised editorial also helped me improve as a writer since I had to revise my old
editorial and it really helped me improve on my ideas and make a better persuasive paper.