I need help on my portfolio

• Process: Apply writing processes (e.g., pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, proof-reading) and collaborative strategies (e.g., discussion, peer review, critique, conferencing) to a variety of writing tasks, including the use of writing as a tool for inquiry.
• Focus: Develop a controlling idea/thesis for the personal essay.
• Development: Through the close analysis of diverse model texts, identify strategies for supporting, developing, clarifying, and extending the focus of an essay, especially through the integration of cultural perspectives and personal experience.
• Rhetorical Strategies: Analyze a variety of rhetorical situations to respond appropriately to diverse audiences, purposes, and genres.
• Conventions: Identify common formats and conventions (e.g., structure, tone, mechanics) for different genres of writing, including electronic texts.

TASK: Your portfolio is the culmination of all you have learned in this class so far. Your job is to show off what you have learned about writing in this course. How? By compiling your two best pieces of writing from the course, a new reflective essay, and other artifactsfrom the class that represent important steps in your learning this term.

Your two best pieces of writing should be major writing assignments that have been significantly revised, such that they are the absolute best writing you have produced for a class. (Most students choose to do further revision and editing to the pieces they have revised for the two revision projects.) These assignments should feel complete and finished, and you might think of the portfolio as a “publication” opportunity.

Likewise, your reflective essay should be carefully composed, revised, and edited — it, too, should feel complete and finished. (See below for more specifics about the reflective essay.)

The trickiest part of this assignment might be gathering “artifacts” of your learning. What counts as an artifact? Well — just about anything! Consider including any of the following:

• Early drafts of your major writing assignments, to illustrate your growth
• Writer’s Journal entries that were particularly useful to your writing process
• Copies of discussion posts that helped you to understand important concepts
• Copies of peer or instructor feedback that you found especially helpful
• Copies of peer review letters you wrote

Many students find it useful to think of their portfolio as sending a particular message about what they learned in this course. In the “Writing Processes” mini-lecture for unit 7, you will consider a number of approaches to talk with the selection of artifacts, arrangement of the portfolio, and approach to the reflective essay.