Final Portfolio Guide

Assignment Description:

The end of the semester is upon us, so it’s time to get started on the final ePortfolios for this course. The FYW Portfolio gives you an opportunity to reflect on, polish, and showcase the work you have done this semester. This page will serve as your guide to creating the portfolio.

If you want to see a sample of what a finished portfolio looks like, there are example exhibits posted to our eLC page; there are even more examples located on the English Department website.

If you have questions about any step or part of this process, consult this page first. If you are still having trouble or if you have a more specific question that needs to be answered, feel free to send me an email! You’re also welcome to contact your peers, and you may provide each other with informal “reviews” on your drafts.

List of Exhibits:

*Note: This does not mean you have to revise/include the first and second essays written for this class in that order. You can revise any of the three Major Assignments from this class and put them in whatever order you see fit.

Biography

(300 words or less)

Your biography is a short introduction to yourself for the reader of your portfolio. Write a biography that focuses on personal details about yourself that you think would help your reader get to know you as someone personally invested in the topics you’ve chosen to write about this semester. The biography should include a picture of you, or some other relevant picture, but please keep it appropriate.

Introductory Reflective Essay (IRE)

(800-1000 words)

The Introductory Reflective Essay is, most simply, an essay that serves as a guide to your portfolio. This exhibit is THE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECT of your entire portfolio. Your IRE should have a thesis and should analyze and synthesize the elements/components of your First-year English 1101 Portfolio. Essentially, what this means is that you will be writing a clear, concise, thesis-driven essay that introduces your portfolio, makes a central claim or claims, describes, and draws conclusions about your writing, revising, and editing with regard to this class.

Providing plenty of specific evidence to support clear topics is, as always, the foundation of a strong IRE. That’s a lot to cover; plan to write more and edit it down to your very best 800-1000 words (though you are allowed no more than 1500). Here are some possible topics/guiding prompts that you might want to address as you are developing the introduction, body paragraphs, or the conclusion of your IRE:

  • Explain why you chose each of the exhibits that you have included in your portfolio.
  • Reflect on your strengths and weaknesses as a writer in any part of the writing and composing processes (doing research, pre-writing [outlining, brainstorming, etc.], drafting, editing, peer editing, post-writing [the reflections we did in class after each MA]).
  • Use portions of your portfolio exhibits and other documents to provide supporting evidence/examples. Reflect on your strengths and weakness as a writer in any area of the craft itself (unity, evidence, presentation, coherence, audience awareness, imagination, etc.). Use portions of your portfolio exhibits and other documents to provide supporting evidence/examples. Quote yourself! Just don’t go overboard or spend most of your time describing your exhibits.
  • Comment on the most interesting, most difficult, the most surprising things you learned about yourself as a writer. Describe what is difficult for you and/or what is easy for you about the writing process.
  • Describe how the different skills used in reading/annotating, researching, drafting, editing, composing, organizing, analyzing, documenting, proofreading, and writing in this course, as demonstrated in your portfolio, contribute to your ability to perform well in other courses or activities (think about such skills as developing critical thinking, recognizing good uses of logic and reasoning [logos], knowing how to support claims with specific evidence, recognizing appeals to emotion [pathos] and to personal credibility [ethos], increasing awareness of audience, context, topic, purpose, author, increasing your awareness of rhetorical “situations,” etc.).
  • In other words, what did this course teach you that you can apply to other courses and life situation?
  • Show how your portfolio items contribute towards meeting the stated goals of this course. See the syllabus for a list of these goals.

Approaches you should AVOID: 

  • Writing one paragraph about each item in your portfolio. In other words, don’t just give us a list of each element in your portfolio. It’s a better idea to organize your IRE based on skills you learned, and then use examples from multiple exhibits to support your claims.
  • Writing about how you are a “bad” writer who hasn’t improved at all (because that is a straight-up lie, and we all know it)
  • Making lots of good/bad evaluative claims about your writing with very few or no supporting examples.
  • Talking about everything but the items in your portfolio.
  • Writing a narrative about your ENGL 1101 class in general. In other words, don’t describe things we learned in the class in a chronological way: “First we learned ____ and I improved. Then we learned ____ and I improved in that, too.”
  • Discussing your grades on each assignment/grades in any form or context.

Two Revised Projects

Your portfolio must include TWO revised Major Assignments you’ve created for this class. It doesn’t matter which two you choose. What matters is that they are your two strongest pieces of writing and have been revised in accordance to the feedback you’ve received from your instructor and/or the Writing Center and/or peers.

Make sure your exhibits are formatted correctly. If you have more specific formatting questions, the Purdue OWL is a great resource, or check out the main websites for MLA, Chicago, or APA.

Peer Review Exhibit

The goal of this exhibit is to show off your insightful and helpful peer editing comments to your portfolio audience in a manner that supports the claims you make in the thesis of your IRE.

STEPS:

  1. Select a classmate’s document that you have reviewed/commented on during the semester (this is NOT one that a partner completed for your draft, but one that YOU completed for a partner). Choose a document that you believe is a good representation of your peer editing skills and that relates to the claim you’re making in your IRE.
  2. Ask for permission to post the selected classmate’s paper to your portfolio (the email addresses of your classmates are available in the class list on eLC; you could also ask them in person or send me an email if you’re having trouble getting in touch with them).
  3. Write an introduction to the peer review in which you:
    1. Provide attribution to the original author (ex. John Smith graciously allowed me to use my review of his essay, entitled “Essay Title,” in my portfolio for my peer review exhibit).
    2. Point out any particular feature(s) to which you would like to direct your reader. You will want to reiterate some point of the discussion about the peer review exhibit in your IRE. The goal here is to “point” your reader to the relevant portion of the peer review (the portion that you’ll use as evidence in your IRE).
  4. Save your document and when you’re ready, upload it to the eLC Portfolio assignment in the proper order.

Revision Exhibit

The goal of this exhibit is to show the same part of a paper in at least three stages of development and to describe and explain to your audience what you felt you improved, specified, revised, or otherwise changed between the versions. You may use one of the revision reflections we’ve created this semester, just be sure to edit it and add a short introduction.

STEPS

  1. Select a passage from one of your papers and copy in versions of that same passage from your three different drafts (for example: draft 1, draft 2/final, revised version). Often students choose to trace the evolution of their thesis/introduction, but you may choose to describe the way you developed some evidence for a body paragraph, re-envisioned your conclusion, or track any other passage you have revised through multiple drafts. Most students include at least three drafts of the same or similar paragraph and some students include as many as seven different versions of the same sentence. 
  2. Copy and paste those sections into a new document. Label each section (for example, First, Second, Third or first draft, second draft, final, etc.).
  3. Write a short introductory paragraph for this revision exhibit using a different color font or style. Describe what you are presenting and why you are presenting it.
    1. Consider answering:
      1. What did you focus on in your changes?
      2. How do these changes (in general terms) improve the text for the reader?
      3. What composing practices led to these changes?
      4. Why did you choose this particular passage for the revision exhibit?
  4. Find a way to make evident for your reader (using highlighting, color, strikethrough, etc.) what has been changed between versions. You may wish to include a color “key” for the changes.
  5. After and/or within each section, insert commentary in a different color or as a note. Describe what was going on in your writing process at each point—a play by play of your thinking and actions as you drafted this paper. Some questions to think about: What did you change, and why? What could you or should you have changed and why? Feel free to include any markup or comments included in earlier versions (from peer review or teaching comments).
  6. Save your document and when you’re ready, upload it to the eLC Portfolio assignment in the proper order.

Wildcard

The old adage claims that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else. Your wildcard, therefore, should present something important you learned this semester in a teachable format. Be as creative as you feel like being–I’ll be looking for your ability to clearly explain and demonstrate an important concept, and not necessarily artistry (though feel free to go wild if you’re so inclined).

Exactly who will be your audience is up to you. Here’s a few examples: your roommates; middle-schoolers at your alma mater; a movie or TV character; your parents; a high-school English class; etc. etc. etc. You get the picture.

The format or genre you choose is also up to you. A short slide deck is acceptable, as is a video of you “lecturing,” as is poem, as is a rap, as is a screenplay, as is a picture collage with accompanying text. Again, you get the picture. Choose a format and genre that works for you and that isn’t going to cause you too much headache (we are at the end of the semester, after all).

Here’s an example to get you started: say I wanted to teach the use of metaphor to a group of middle-school students. I could create a picture collage associating various ideas, along with a short lesson plan that guides the students through creating metaphors from the provided images.