adapted from Thinking Through Theory by James Thomas Zebroski
Your final essay assignment for this course is to compose a writing portfolio. This portfolio will present a view of your development as a writer in this course across time. It is a kind of history of your writing that tries to develop and support a main claim about your writing. The claim or main point must take the form of a metaphor that structures your account.
The portfolio will include:
A selection of your writing this semester carefully arranged in a well thought-out order. These texts should give the reader some sense of the variety of writing you have done. Such texts could include free writing and other forms of prewriting, introductory paragraphs, InterChange postings in DIWE, response pages, drafts, final essays, peer editing responses, and Prometheus writing. Given the amount of Prometheus writing you have done, it would be hard to write a strong essay without drawing on that archive, just as it would be hard to do a good job without citing both drafts and final versions of some of your essays.
Annotations attached to each text; these annotations should briefly tell (in one paragraph or less) what the text is and why it is important as evidence of your writing development;
An essay (6-7 pages double-spaced) that analyzes your writing development by citing the texts included.
The essay should not be a simple narration of the semester, though you may do that to set up the point you wish to prove. Rather, the paper should interpret the texts, analyzing the rhetoric of the texts and giving the reader other information not included in the texts that is important to the evaluation of your writing across time. You have worked this semester to analyze and make arguments about other people's writing; this assignment asks you to use the skills developed while evaluating other texts in the consideration of your own writing and thinking.
Writing development is NOT usually one long story of progress. It is often irregular and intermittent, going backward in order to go forward at a later point. Risk-taking is crucial to growth but often creates errors or inadequacies. Your job is to spot some of the patterns of growth in your writing over this term, both to formulate a sense of what you have learned and to suggest where you may grow next in your writing abilities. I should stress that this essay can include responses to my comments about your essays but it should not simply re-present what I have already said about your writing. The goal of this assignment is to encourage you to think critically about your own patterns of growth and difficulties so that after you leave this class, your increased self-awareness as a writer will help you build on your strengths and gradually redress your weaknesses.
Your selection of texts (and texts about texts) should reflect your growth in writing. This is why selection, annotation, and arrangement are so crucial in putting the portfolio together.
Your portfolio should be presented in a folder that is clearly labeled with your name. The order in which it should be read should be clear. Keep in mind that what counts here is: (1) insight into your own writing processes rather than just summary of what you did; (2) evidence of varied writing; (3) a well-illustrated account of the pattern of your writing as it has developed over the course of the semester; and (4) a clear point (or metaphor) that structures all of this material.