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Gabe Hicks
Breanne Potter
Technical Writing
12/2/15
Final Reflection
For the course Technical writing, we students were required to compose three projects.
This included an instruction set, a business proposal, and an analytical report. Each one
contributed to students learning in ways directed by the instructor. Enter SLOs, or Student
Learning Outcomes, which are goals for students. Throughout the semester students have been
required to write about these SLOs in reflections on the various projects. Students also must
write about the revisions they had made in the project during the writing process. Now students
(myself included) will demonstrate what they learned in terms of SLOs through the entire
semester, as well as make adjustments to their first two projects and list their reasoning behind
these changes in one final reflection.
As stated before, an SLO is a Student Learning Outcome. For this course, there are four
SLOs the instructor wanted students to make progress toward. The first one is called Analyze
Rhetorical Situation. In my words, this means find the scenario for which you are writing. Are
you writing a manual? Are you making a presentation? Are you proposing something? Find out
the medium that best suits your piece of writing. Also determine your subject matter. What are
you writing about? Then, find out who you are writing for. Whos going to read and/or listen to
your work? Lastly, determine why you are writing it. Whats the purpose? Once you discover
this, the writing will become easier. For my example, the first assignment required us to figure
out who and what we were writing for. As I mentioned earlier, the first project was an instruction

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set. So here, I had to learn that we were writing a technical manual for something. Then I decided
what to write it on, the Gameboy Color, and who my audience was. I figured, since the Gameboy
was old, I was writing to old-school gamers; these people had known the Gameboy, but maybe
they had lost the original instruction manual and couldnt remember how to play. Also I decided I
was writing to people who were into retro gaming, but had never picked up a Gameboy before;
they were going to need help. The purpose of my instruction manual involved teaching those
with bad memory or no education at all concerning the Gameboy. I took it upon myself to make
the manual as clear as day so that those who didnt know or remember could understand how to
operate the game system. That is my understanding of the first SLO.
The next Student Learning Outcome is named Find and Evaluate Information. Defined by
me, this means conducting research basically. To go further, it also means determining which
info is useful to your project. What info do you put in and what do you filter out as nonsense?
Also, this is making sure that your research holds true. If you found an article online based on a
study from 1996, and it turns out a study in 2010 has since disproved this, then you wont
include the 1996 study unless you point out both studies and tell your audience which one isnt
relevant. For my third project, my partner, Randy Otero and I, conducted research to compare
study habits of students on campus versus off campus. While we did sit and gather information
on our own, we also looked a few things up online. Unfortunately, finding articles relevant to our
topic proved difficult. While some were related to our topic, others seemed tangent to our own
research. We included one of these tangent articles, but told our audience of the difficulty and
how it didnt relate much to our study, but still provided some interesting notes. I have made
progress toward this second SLO through our analytical report.

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The third SLO, Compose Information, requires students to take the information found
utilizing the second SLO and turn it into something coherent. The audience must be able to
understand the work. If a student has written nothing more than gibberish, they have failed to
learn from this SLO. Compose Information also involves working with others and decisions of
what content to include based on ethics. Simply put, a group of students will have to decide
whether or not the research they found was unbiased, not racist, ethical, etc. Then they will put
together a piece of work neatly that people can read with ease. In my case, I go back to the
analytical report. First off, my partner was Randy Otero; that makes us a group right off the bat.
Next, we both had to conduct surveys for our research which meant finding people who would
live both on and off campus. While surveying students at UNM, we had to survey at multiple
locations to keep our data in line. We had to stop surveying at the Student Union Building when
we had enough samples of kids who lived off campus, and we switched to the UNM dining hall
where we were sure to get more responses from those who lived on Campus. This may not be
representative of a random sample in statistics, but its the best we could do considering ethics.
We didnt discriminate against race; we asked who ever we saw at the time. Finally, we had to
organize our data into a google slides presentation that our intended audience could read and
understand. Our analytical report helped with the SLOs a lot.
The final SLO, present information builds on the previous one. I already mentioned how
an audience needs to understand the writing, and thats included in this SLO. This however is
more so the process of changing the work from rough draft to final draft form. Students, after
organizing their research into a piece of writing, will go in again and refine the work to make it
look, sound, and feel better. When I say look better here, I do mean include pictures. For my
example, I changed my instruction set to fit peer suggestions and added a warning above where I

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taught people to insert a cartridge. This required proper cartridge insertion, and misuse of the
Gameboy could lead to damage to the system, so I warned people not to turn the system on until
a cartridge had been inserted. I also added a list of required materials to make it more in line with
the instruction set theme. Overall, I think this instruction set helped me with the SLOs as well.

Finally, reflections also make use of students abilities to edit. We were asked to revise
the first two projects from the class and then list here why we made these changes. To start, I
modified my instruction set just a little. I replaced a few of the photos I had taken because they
were blurry. I also re-aligned my conclusion to the left instead of the center so that it looked like
the rest of the manual. I also made some space between each instruction step. This was done to
not make the manual appear text heavy since people dont want to read a lot of information. My
reflection for this assignment needed no changes since I had addressed the SLOs and understood
the purpose of reflecting on an assignment. Next I had to edit my Proposal.
This second project, the proposal, felt like a difficult thing. I hadnt fully understood how
it should be formatted, so I made some edits to make it more presentable. For one I added
headers to the various sections in my proposal. This lets the audience know what Ill be talking
about when, instead of giving them a string of confusing text. I added a sentence or two to give a
little more clarity on what I was proposing in the beginning. I also made a few edits to my cover
letter, including a very brief description of what I propose at the end, and a clarification on who
Im addressing in the letter. Lastly, I changed my resume to limit three bullet points underneath
each job, and I eliminated my background experience because I felt it wasnt important to the
proposal. Deleting this also made my resume one page, making a readers job easier. Once again,

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I left my reflection well enough alone. I learned in this class despite my having been a good
writer already.
To finish, SLOs are interesting. They provide clear goals for students when most college
kids dont know exactly what to do. I like how I can talk about them and learn things based on
what they outline. For example, I didnt change my websites name for convenience sake. I may
not have learned much initially, but in reflection I learned more than I thought I had. On my last
note, I like the idea of telling someone the reason behind why I did something. Reflections help
me learn, and they help me explain to those who might have questions. I made progress in
Technical Writing, English 219.

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