December 10, 2013 Dr. Leslie Bruce English Department. Room: UH-526 800 N.

State College Boulevard Fullerton, CA 92831 Dear Dr. Bruce, My persuasive essay was definitely a formal writing, and most of the research for that essay was actually done in class. You gave us a lot of time in class to brainstorm ideas and then search the internet for research after choosing our topic. After collecting all the research, I was then able to go home and try to put all of that research together to form a persuasive essay. I wrote this essay with the purpose of attending to the values, needs, and experience of Graeme Lockaby (editor of On Water) and multi-disciplinary college composition students. Choosing which major assignment I wanted to use for my portfolio was very difficult, but I decided to go with the persuasive essay because it did the best job of demonstrating the student learning outcomes for this class. It presented information from many different sources (including peer reviewed sources) to give the essay more authority. The best evidence of this is in my bibliography page, which shows that I used nine different sources for that essay. Another student learning outcome this essay demonstrated was that it objectively compares and contrasts opposing arguments. An example of this is in the bottom paragraph of page 4 in my persuasive essay, The biggest fear that people have with drinking tap water is that tap water is dangerous, and in certain instances people have suffered greatly from unsafe tap water. Published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Stephanie Chalupka writes a journal to warn people about illnesses resulting from drinking water. In this section of my essay, I am clearly presenting an opposing viewpoint to my thesis. I reference a journal written by Stephanie Chalupka to inform the audience of the illnesses that people have suffered from drinking tap water. After revealing evidence in support of that claim, I then refuted it objectively using research from a peer-reviewed article. I organized my thoughts and communicated them clearly in my essay so that the reader would not be confused at all in reading my argument. An example of demonstrating this ability to organize my thoughts clearly is in the second paragraph of page 5 of my persuasive essay, After researching the reasons and evidence in support of tap water over bottled water, it seems that tap water just might be the better option. The price of bottled water is too high, and it is especially affecting people with lower incomes. Bottled waters effect on the environment is also another reason tap water seems like the better choice. As you can see, I used this part of my essay to summarize the main points I had made throughout the essay and communicated to the audience exactly what I wanted to them to take away from this essay. In the persuasive essay I managed to inform the audience why the topic is an important matter. I did this by providing a couple of quotes in my introductory paragraph that talked about the value of water for human life and that informed the audience of how much bottled water is being consumed each year. I also demonstrated sensitivity to

gender and cultural differences by using language that could not be misinterpreted as offensive. Lastly, I was able to improve my own writing skills through the assessment and critique of my written works. You gave me helpful comments so that I could go back to my essay and make corrections to form it into a better essay. The best example of this is how you told me to contextualize a quote I used at the bottom of page 2. I was then able to go back and give the audience some background information so they can know exactly what the quote is talking about. Thanks for reading my cover letter Dr. Bruce, and I hope this letter helps to show my improvements I have made as a writer from the beginning of the semester till now. Sincerely, Jeffrey Mueller