Dear E-Portfolio Reader:

I strongly believe that during this semester, Writing and Rhetoric has not only strengthened my writing skills but also my professional business skills which I can use in and outside of my college career.

My first struggle I came across when beginning my Persuasive Business Letter was who exactly I am writing to. At first, I had chosen to write to a CEO of a company that was working on a technology to detect deepfakes, but my thesis statement was weak and too broad. Not much later, I spoke to Professor Rigolino of who I should direct my letter to, and she helped me narrow my thesis where I then chose to write to the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey. When writing research papers for other classes I find myself starting off with the same problem, not being able to create a clear and concise thesis statement. Taking this course has helped me in coming up with a strong thesis which is something I know will help me many other times during my time in college.

Not only did we focus on our writing skills, but we also learned more about how to properly connect with others in business settings such as working in teams or learning to write professional emails/ internal memos. These skills helped me with structuring my writing which is something that I have struggled with in my writing in the past. Throughout the process of writing my persuasive letter, I believe I greatly improved on structuring and organizing my essay better. In my first couple drafts my content was very unorganized and didn’t flow as well as I knew it could, Prof. Rigolino provided us with a chart of how our essays should be structured and it helped my writing greatly. One rhetorical technique that I learned more about using when writing my Persuasive Business Letter is ethos. Throughout my letter I connected more with my audience by appealing to ethics.

I enjoyed creating my virtual presentation and putting it all together with the recording. In the past I have found myself adding too many bullet points or clutter in my slides which I have now realized is not how a strong presentation should look like. When we looked at how bad presentations looked like, I had found myself making the same mistakes. I have then learned from my errors and focused more on what was being said when presenting rather than adding a lot of information to my slides. Another thing I learned a lot from was using the Sojourner Truth Library Database. When writing a research paper, I usually just look for articles on Google which lead me to different news outlets such as the NY Times or Wall Street Journal. But while conducting my research for this paper, I learned how to use the Sojourner Truth Database to look for trusted resources that were a lot of help when writing my paper and very informative.

A strength I believe I have when writing is connecting to the audience. When writing I put myself in the shoes of the audience to see if what I’m saying is impactful. When writing to the CEO of Twitter I made sure to create a connection before I expressed my concern with what was going on in his platform. One thing that I believe needs more strengthening in my writing is the use of sophisticated language, sometimes I find myself using informal vocabulary. I am an avid reader of books and like to keep up with current news which I think is improving my vocabulary, which I will continue to do so.

Thank you for taking the time to read my letter.

Respectfully,

Dalia Paredes