ENG 121 – Summer Session Portfolio Assignment
When this class runs during a 15 week semester, we usually spend the final two weeks of the semester assembling portfolios. The idea is to give you an opportunity to reflect on what you’ve written over the course of the semester, and a chance to demonstrate your personal growth as a writer as a result of this class by revising some of your work and writing a bit about the process behind those revisions.
But the truncated structure of Summer Session doesn’t really afford us that kind of time for reflection. So, instead of trying to get you to revise a large array of work, I’ll instead just be asking you to revise a small segment of your writing from this class. For your final portfolio, you’ll need to either:
– Revise one piece of writing substantially, making substantial changes to it (beyond basic error corrections) and potentially expanding that piece.
– Or combine two or more pieces of writing into a single larger singular piece of work, making substantial revisions to synthesize the two pieces.
You’ll also need to:
– Include at least three other pieces of writing from this class, with some minor corrections.
– And include a cover letter, which will function as both an introduction to your portfolio, and an artist’s statement explaining the mindset behind your revision and selection process for this portfolio.
Together, these elements will be worth 40% of your total grade in this class. They should be turned in as a single modifiable document file attached to an email, or as a collection of clearly labeled files attached to a single email. You should send this work my way before the end of the day on August 20th. You may want to number your pages, and add a table of contents to this document, just to make it easier to review your own work. The most important elements to focus on here are the large revision, and the cover letter.
I’d like to give you a more detailed description of the cover letter assignment here, since many of you may not be familiar with crafting course meta-texts and reflective letters. The cover letter is essentially an opportunity for you to discuss your processes and development as a writer through the lens of this class. In it, you’ll want to:
– Explain your development as a writer over the course of this class, with references to your initial writing philosophy statement, the course goals, and any individual readings or assignments that impacted your approach to writing.
– Explain the process behind how you selected work for your final portfolio, as well as the process behind the revisions you made to that work. Readers should clearly understand the intention behind your decisions to include certain pieces, and drop others. They should also understand the mindset behind the changes you made to those pieces.
The end goal of your cover letter is to demonstrate a familiarity with the concepts we’ve discussed in class, and an awareness of the vocabulary and techniques that you were introduced to. It’s a bit like a take-home exam, where you prove that you absorbed course material by having a discussion about how your writing demonstrates that absorption.
Most successful cover letters feel a bit like argumentative papers that use your writing as source material to help them demonstrate that you’ve achieved course goals over our semester together. Since this is the single largest contributor to your final grade, it can be a bit frustrating to hear that this assignment doesn’t have anything like a minimum word count. The best I can do is tell you that you’ll want to take your time on it, and really demonstrate that you’ve taken the assignment seriously. Successful cover letters tend to be more than two pages long, but if they address the concerns I’ve mentioned previously, they can be longer, or shorter. Just think of your audience, your work, and the course goals for this class, and you’ll likely be alright.
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