Project 4: Digital Portfolio and Reflective Essay

English 3840J - Writing, Reading, and Rhetoric in the Professions Formal Requirements Reflective Essay: 1500-1800 wds., 5-6 pp. Major Revision of Project 2 or 3 Revision Cover Letter: 400-600 wds, 1-2 pp. Finished Digital Portfolio (Wordpress site) Important Dates April 11: Intro to Project 4 April 16 & 18: Drafting (Meet in Lab) April 23 & 25: Conferences with Instructor May 2: Project 4 due via e-mail/web, 12 noon.

Introduction
As culminating projects of this course, the Digital Portfolio and Final Reflective Essay represent opportunities for you to 1) review and reflect on the course material and what youve learned thus far, and 2) demonstrate that learning to yourself and the instructor. The idea here is to show me what youve gained from taking this course, how well youve understood and been able to apply the readings, and what your new understanding of writing (in the professions) amounts to. The project consists of 4 elements: 1. a major Reflective Essay that looks back on the whole course and the work youve done throughout the semester; 2. a major Revision of Project 2 or 3; 3. a Revision Cover Letter that explains your revision; 4. your finished Digital Portfolio (Wordpress site) Under the grading contract, the portfolio and reflective essay are also chances for you to raise your final grade by one full letter, e.g. B to A if you have met all of the obligations thus far. An A portfolio demonstrates superior writing and mastery of course content. You should be able to prove that you have met applicable course outcomes and that, after taking this course, you have come to a new, more informed understanding of what writing is and how it works. Much of this should be accomplished explicitly in the Reflective Essay, but I will also be looking at the other components of the Portfolio, e.g. Projects 2 and 3, Reading Responses.

Reflective Essay
Weve done a lot of reflective writing in this course. Why? Because numerous studies have shown that this kind of metacognitive work will help you become a better writer. The more you can think about what youre doing when youre writing, the better prepared youll be for different writing tasks. It was also my hope that the smaller reflective essays you wrote for each project would help you in putting together your final (much longer) reflective essay. As opposed to those earlier reflective writings, I want you to think about this essay as something a little more polished, organized, and formal. After all, one of the main goals here is to make an argument for how youve become a better writer by learning about and practicing writing in this course.

Your Reflective Essay should accomplish the following: Reflect on how your understanding of writing developed throughout the course, especially in regards to your profession. Position your understanding within the conversations of the articles we have read in class as well as the Learning Outcomes for English 3840j (see syllabus). 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 or idea about what determines if writing is successful or not. In other words, what have you learned about writing and how it works? Review and critique the writing youve done in the course, paying close attention to the situation, your writing abilities (especially how theyve grown over the course of the assignments), and what you think you might need to keep working on in the future.

Why? I want this project to give you the opportunity to assert your new knowledge of writing by thinking back and reflecting on the writing you have done in this course, situate that in relation to what others have argued, and attempting to connect these things to the course outcomes. You may also use this theory to assess 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. Possible Outline 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. For example, In looking back at the work Ive done in this course and everything Ive learned. or I used to think that writing was just a matter of putting words on a page, now I understand it as a socio-material transaction that influences our social structures, behaviors, and realities A Synthesis of the conversation about writing in which you are situating your own account (e.g. genre theory, discourse community theory, academic vs. workplace writing, design, identity, authority, etc.). For example, Much of what I have learned about writing in this course comes from Beauforts discussion of and Wardles discussion of Essay Body: The use of examples, quotes, etc. from your own texts in helping you elaborate on your views about your writing theory and make connections to course outcomes and course readings. For example, My ethnography essay best demonstrates writing as a social act because it allowed me to show how or This idea from Beaufort relates to one of our course outcomes as well, that Conclusion: The final articulation of your argument about what makes writing successful and how it works. For example, Ultimately, what I learned about writing was

Major Revision of Project 2 or 3

The major revision component of this essay simply requires that you read my feedback on either Project 2 or 3 and then do substantial revision on the essay to improve its overall quality. You should improve superficial, mechanical issues (grammar, punctuation, etc.), but you should also understand that you need to go above and beyond that kind of local revision to dramatically change the content, structure, and quality of your essay. To receive credit, your revision should attempt to address and make changes according to all of my feedback. Be sure to save your essay .doc with Last Name, Project # and Revision, e.g. Vetter_Project2_Revision.doc. and include the cover letter in the actual document, either above or below the revised essay.

Revision Cover Letter

This short essay should accomplish three things: 1) describe your own understanding of my feedback, 2) describe what revisions/changes you made to the essay in response to that feedback and 3) discuss how the essay is improved as a result of our dialogue and your changes.

Digital Portfolio
Your final Wordpress site should include 4 pages: 1. a static front page where you have a biographical section (About Me) as well as a forecast of what the site contains. For example, Take a look at my digital portfolio to access my resume (link) and to find out more about how writing works in [profession] (link). 2. A Resume or C.V. page where you host your Resume. You may choose to use Scribd if you want to preserve formatting from Word or some other program. Or you may choose to just copy/paste in the Wordpress text editor as many of you have already done. 3. A Writing in [Your Profession] page. Here you should host scribd copies of both Project 2 and Project 3. Embed these scribd files directly into the page and provide some introduction of each. For example, "In this essay, I examine two genres commonly used by those in [profession] with the ultimate goal of showing how understanding these genres means understanding the social contexts in which they are situated. 4. Dont remove your original blog that contains all your Reading Responses, at least until I assign grades. After that, youre free to do whatever with your wordpress sites.

Professional Portfolio/Web Presence

But I do hope youll consider leaving some of your portfolio online as a way of building a professional portfolio and web presence for yourself. This is obviously more relevant for some fields than other (I think especially of journalism), but you would be surprised by how often people are building these kinds of web sites to promote themselves and their work. I hope that this course has allowed you to practice thinking about and working on such a project, even if you dont use it in the future. A Note on Delivery: Your digital portfolio should include your Major Revision, but not your revision cover letter. Please also e-mail me your Major Revision in .doc format, with the cover letter in the same .doc.