Project #4: Reflective/Analytical Essay & Final Portfolio

For your final essay for the course, I will ask you to write a reflective analysis of your writing (15001800), your own theory of writing, and how those have developed over the course of the semesteryou will need to use examples from your writing to illustrate and support your analysis. In this essay you should Reflect on your understanding of what writing is and how it works Position your understanding within the conversations of the articles we have read in class and you have researched for your various projects Select passages from your own work to help you elaborate on and discuss your changing ideas as they show up in the writing you have done Assert your own theory (explanation) about what determines if writing is successful or not.

After you assert your own theory of writing, you will then use that theory/frame as the context in which you will analyze and criticize the work in your final portfolio (from which you should have drawn examples as you developed your theory of writing). For each text you include in your portfolio, I will ask you to Explain what it is, the (hypothetical) situation for which you produced it (the qualities of the particular discourse community, etc. might be important), and why you chose to write it the way you did. Analyze its strengths and weaknessesan honest assessment is more important than salesmanshipand discuss what it demonstrates about your writing abilities; this may include how they have changed, where they were to begin with, and how you think they might change in the futureknowing that you need to work on something is the first step in actually working on it; we often recognize we need to work on something long before our efforts actually begin to be apparent.

Purpose
I want this project to give you the opportunity to explicitly work out and reflect on what you understand about writing with explicit connections to the writing you have done in this course, situate that in relation to what others have argued, and extend it to an explicit articulation of what you think is required for writing to be successful, which you will then use to critically analyze your own work in order to discuss where you have been, are, and hope to be in terms of your abilities to use writing successfully. This exercise should help you determine for yourself what you need to continue to work on, and how you can better approach writing situations in the future. This project is also a key part of your final portfolio for the course and will serve as an introduction, organizing tool, and guide of sorts for the selection of texts you choose to include. This essay then, becomes an important part of the portfolio, which will be used to determine if the quality of your writing justifies raising your grade.

What Ill be looking for

An introduction that provides an interesting and informative frame for discussing your writing, your own theory of what it is and how it works, and your analysis of your own texts. You could frame your writing in before/after or then/now terms, or another operative frame. A synthesis of the conversation about writing in which you are situating your own account. The use of examples, quotes, etc. from your own texts in helping you elaborate on your views about your operative writing theory, writing processes, sense of genres, discourse communities, the relation between writing and identity, and your idea about literacy more generally. Articulating your own ideas about writing should also include discussion of why and how you revised, used feedback, tweaked style, thought about audience/discourse community, and made decisions as you worked to develop texts over time. You should integrate your own work in the portfolio selections into your essay as you might another source. For example, in my paper on X, in my introduction I used X and said . I had changed this because I wanted to emulate what Z and Y did in their article. This demonstrates that . . . The articulation of your position about what makes writing successful (your theory). Specific discussion about each text in your portfolio, why you wrote it the way you did (why did you think particular choices would be effective, etc.) its strengths and weaknesses in relation to your concept of successful writing and your theory of writing in general, and what it demonstrates about your developing writing abilities.

Possible Strategies
Use the course learning objectives from the syllabus to guide your argument and analysis. Show how you achieved these objectives. Use some questions to drive your essay, such as How has my approach to reading changed and how has this affected how I write? and Use the literacy history as a basis for extending the history to include this course; who have been your literacy sponsors this term? Use examples, stories, and experiences to illustrate your points. Move back and forth between metacognitive points about writing and rhetoric and specific instances that demonstrate your understanding of these points.

The Portfolio
Other than responding to your writing with feedback meant to help you learn as you continue to work with your emerging texts, the only evaluation that I will do of your

writing will be in the final portfolio. The only evaluative decision I will make is whether I think your writing is exceptional enough to motivate me to raise your final grade one letter from that guaranteed by the grading contract and your subsequent adherence to or violation of it. For this purpose, I will ask you to compile two portfolios 1) A preliminary collection of all the work you have produced for the course, which you should organize in a way that makes sense to you, 2) a selection of your best writing to submit along with the following required items:

A table of contents with titles Reflective/Analytical Essay Your major rewrite of Project 1 or 3 required by the grading contractthis must be a dramatically changed text that alters or expands on the original project in readily apparent ways based on my (and peers) feedback to the original project. You should also develop and polish any other final texts you choose to include in the portfolio to the extent you think is warranted by your purposes and the feedback you received. Revised reflective cover letters for all major essays you are required, or choose, to include. In addition to the elements asked for in the original reflective cover letter, these should also include discussions of what changes, if any, youve made (why you changed it, why you think the new paper is more effective, etc.). You may choose to include anything not required that you feel demonstrates the exceptional quality of your writing.

The Collected Works Portfolio will be due November 28th as part of your work towards the second, selected portfolio. I will ask you to include a reflective cover letter explaining how and why you organized your collected works. It should help you organize your work and select texts (for the selected portfolio) that you feel will demonstrate the quality of your work. Place all of your CW portfolio files and folders into a single folder and email that folder to me. Compress the folder by zipping it before emailing. You should not limit your selections for the selected portfolio just to polished final work since other texts like marked up earlier texts, responses to readings, and other such informal writing can often demonstrate important writing qualities better than finished formal writing can. Draft of Reflective/Analytical Essay and draft of select portfolio due to me on Dec. 2 by [fill in time]. In the days following you and I will meet to discuss your Reflective/Analytical Essay draft. Your Selected final portfolio will be due on the date of our scheduled final: (TBA) You will need to create an electronic folder of your collected works that can be turned in via dropbox. You will create an electronic portfolio on the course blog (email the links to me) for the final portfolio with links to each text. You will need to upload each file in your final portfolio to scribd.com or google.docs or another file hosting site. Make sure the link works and that all documents can be opened and are fully operable. All print

documents should be in a recent version of Word; web sites must be accessible. The course blog will be set to only allow access to our class, and you can set the privacy on your uploaded files to only allow those to whom you give the URL to access them. It is up to you to choose the level of privacy you want to have for your documents.