11 December 2015

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,
We begin the presentation with a brief summary of documents provided in my portfolio.
Each document will have the purpose of fulfilling the student learning outcomes from our
course. By the end of this letter, I hope to successfully fulfill the student learning outcome (SLO)
of persuasion through comparison of documents, contextualizing the importance of SLOs, and
providing solid evidence of my SLO mastery through document analysis.
The first document being presented is a peer review of my iFixit Replacement Guide for
the Nabi DreamTab HD8 Front Panel Assembly. In order to make a successful technical
document for an international audience, how we organize the information is particularly
important. We need to establish a solid rhetorical focus to determine how we will write the
guides. For the iFixit guide, a formal tone is most appropriate to address a global community.
The purpose of an online replacement guide is to inform and instruct an individual to fix or
replace their device, and since we are reaching out to a global scale, the language needs to be
simple and easy to understand. The peer review done by colleague Luis Delgado shows a
collaborative effort to create a guide with minimal clichs and jokes that may alienate certain
English speaking audiences from different cultural backgrounds.
The second document is the instructor review of my iFixit guide. It seems that even with
my collaborative efforts with Luis, certain things that escape the students eyes never go past
the mentor. In addition to both review documents being a collaborative effort, another lesson I
learned is that specialists such as Dr. Bruce have more years of experience that allow them to
catch commonly overlooked things. The one major point that escaped both me and Luis, and
brought to attention by Dr. Bruce, is that many English speakers around the word have vastly
different cultural experiences, so we need to consider the language when writing certain
documents, and make them as simple and direct as possible. Jokes, slang, sarcasm and certain
clichs are not as universally understood as some people may think.
My third document is the actual iFixit Replacement Guide. It will be available in the
form of a link. After doing intensive revision on the document from both reviews, you will
notice, that the SLOs of collaboration, language and design, organization and rhetorical focus
are effectively met. The overall layout of the guides using markups and bullet points, symbols
to indicate warnings and additional steps and presence of white space in abundance drew the
reader to truly focus on the uncluttered design of the guide.
Even with such a seemingly simple document and multiple revisions, my weakness of
using overly complicated words was still evident. It took a lot more time and revision to catch
these simple mistakes and unlearn some poor writing habits (usually in college or high school
writing, students feel that quantity over quality is valued). There seemed to be inconsistencies

in subject-verb placement in the instructions in each step, which I ended up fixing. Once these
discrepancies were pointed out in the instructor review, I was able to fix the items and be more
aware of how design, placement and grammar all work together to create a more cohesive
experience.
The fourth and final component of the portfolio consists of two slides from group
presentation about the detriment of eWaste. This document should satisfy the SLO of ethical
citation, as the citation and APA format citing within the document are both evident. Although I
still need to work on simplicity, I can use the newfound command of English writing to help me
in my own scientific and comedy writing both fields that I wish to pursue in the future. I am
extremely grateful for all youve taught us and thank you again for an informative and fun
semester.
My best,
Jay-Ram Rajendra