Welcome to my Professional Writing Portfolio! This is where I am displaying my assignments from Professional Writing. You can view my projects: my correspondence (including my persuasive letter and bad news letter), brochure, press release, and formal report. I have also included a reflection of the class under the conclusion page.

Professional Profile
My name is Michael Edwards and I am currently a senior English major with a creative writing concentration. I plan to graduate from Longwood University in May 2020. During the summer break of 2019, I interned at Osbourn High School as an assistant teacher during the SOL Boot Camp program. During the internship, I worked closely with the teachers and even ran a few classes independently. I worked with students receiving ESOL, students receiving Special Education, and regular education students. Working with a variety of students cultivated my already strong people skills, taught me patience, and when to positively push someone. I am a hard, dedicated worker and put my all in every project I work on. I have loved writing since I was in elementary school. I possess a diverse experience writing numerous forms of writing including: long and short form writing, literary analysis, professional and technical writing, poetry, fiction, scripts, and non-fiction. I am able to adapt to different audiences with ease.

ePortfolio Purpose and Content
The purpose of this ePortfolio is to display my projects and assignments from English 470, the professional writing course I took during the Fall 2019 semester. The correspondence, involving the Bad News Letter and Persuasive Letter, was one of my first experiences writing professional documents. In the Persuasive letter, I wrote to a local councilor to complain about the dangerous potholes on my street. Using facts, details, AIDA, I constructed a well-written letter making a case to the councilor that the potholes needed to be repaired urgently. In the Bad News Letter, I wrote to a branch of employees as their manager. I wrote this bad news letter as a memo and informed the employees that casual Fridays had been cancelled. I also created a brochure and a press release with a group of classmates. We designed the brochure to promote a product that we imagined. We wrote the press release to announce the product to the media. Working with the same group, we also created a Formal Report. With this assignment we analyzed three hotel websites. We used our analyses of these websites to recommend a webdesign to another hotel company.

Through these projects, I was able to achieve the course learning outcomes listed below. I can analyze and produce writing genres found in the professional writing world as proved by the assignments I completed. I can create professional documents that use clear, concise, and grammatically correct English due to learning from my successes and failures of my assignments. I can conduct research to create content for a variety of professional documents such as memos, letters, and reports due to practicing doing so in my class assignments. I can create professional documents that use design-standard formats, layout, and use of graphics due to working with my groups to accomplish these tasks. I have practiced oral communication skills to present content effectively through my Ted Talk-style presentation and my presentation with my Formal Report group. I have participated productively in collaborative projects as seen with my brochure, press release, and Formal Report.

Course Learning Outcomes
1. Analyze and produce writing genres commonly found in the professional world (e.g., business, gov., media);
2. Create professional documents that use plain English (clear, concise, and grammatically correct);
3. Conduct research to create content for a variety of professional documents (memos, letters, reports, etc.);
4. Create professional documents that use design-standard formats, layout, use of graphics, etc.
5. Practice oral communication skills to present content effectively (enhanced with multimedia tools);
6. Participate productively in collaborative projects.