Topic 7.2: What's a Portfolio?
What's a Portfolio?
Stop. Put your pens down (or stop your fingers from madly dashing across your keyboard). At this very moment, you just need to read this topic.
It's close to the end of this course. You've been busy, very busy. You have been working on individual writing assignments, and you have been working diligently at building a successful writing community. You have engaged in all stages of the writing process several times over, and you are about to turn in the final draft of your Reader-Response Essay. You have actively read model texts, analyzing them for strategies in your own writing, and you have offered feedback to and received feedback from your peers. Whew! And don't forget grammar reports! Yes, you have been very busy.
All writers need to take a break and take a look at how they are doing as writers, and at this point in the course, you need a moment to pause and chart a course ahead. In the next module, you will be working on a portfolio.
What is a portfolio? A portfolio is a collection of work that demonstrates effort and achievement.
Imagine you are a photo journalist for a magazine and have to present your best work in the past few months and explain the process by which you achieved these signature pieces. Like anyone putting together a collection of work, you go about searching your inventory. With each selection, you review what you did to capture certain photographs (maybe you had to travel long distances, learn new photography techniques, work around family schedules, consider impossible deadlines, work with uncompromising regulations or equipment); you think about how you developed the photographs over time (perhaps using approaches to change the tones of the photos, or editing in details after-the-fact in an editing program); you take into consideration what your fellow photo journalists and your magazine editor advised you as you worked to make the photos award winning for the magazine (you made multiple copies of the work even). Perhaps you realize that some photographs were never fully actualized because you did not give them the time they deserved, and some photographs received more attention than they needed. In the end, you want to present a portfolio of your best work as your presentation.
A writer's portfolio is much like that of the photographer. You assemble a presentation about your best work in this course. Looking ahead, you should plan for a writing portfolio that includes certain elements:
1. Three samples of your best work, including:
1.1. your best formal essay
1.2. your best writing practice assignment
1.3. your best forum post.
2. An essay featuring the following:
2.1. an explanation about why you selected these three samples and what qualities make them particularly effective or successful
2.2. a description your writing process in these three works from coming up with the idea from drafting to revising
2.3. reflection on your least effective writing in this class and explain why you think the writing was not effective
2.4. an assessment on how well you achieved the writing goals you set for yourself at the beginning of the semester
2.5. a explanation regarding what you have learned about yourself as a writer this semester and how your assumptions and understandings of writing and reading have changed as a result of your work in this course.
You are not in the next module yet, but this is a time for reflection. Start thinking about how you would like to present your writing portfolio for this course, and start looking through your inventory. You have plenty to survey!
Assignments
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