Learning Outcomes
This assignment is designed to facilitate your skills in the following areas:
- Compose texts in multiple genres using multiple modes with attention to rhetorical situations.
- Practice writing as a process, recursively implementing strategies of research, drafting, revision, editing, and reflection.
- Locate and integrate archival material into writing and multimodal projects.
In this case your textual mode is the web publishing tool, WordPress, and the archival material you are using is your own work from the beginning of the semester until the last day of class.
Your selected artifacts should be typed as well as free of instructor comments and grades.
Throughout the semester, you have completed various in class writing exercises. These exercises are designed to not only meet WPA outcomes for first-year writing courses (see syllabus) but also to give a broad skill set you can apply to other endeavors, whether academic, public, or professional.
In this assignment, you will use rhetorical key terms you have learned throughout the semester as you reflect on your past assignments and independently problem-solve to assemble a portfolio of your work.
Key Terms
| “Analysis” | “Synthesis” | “Rhetorical Listening/Ethical Action” |
| “Genre” | “Context” | “Evidence (Making, Evaluating, and Revising Claims)” |
| “Audience” | “Known-New Chain” | “Rhetorical Thinking” |
| “Visual Logic” | “Reflective Writing” | “Holistic Organization” |
Your portfolio will include in class writing assignments, drafts, and selections from final drafts to tell a story through judicious combination of text and image. Through a combination of the skills acquired through analysis and synthesis writing, group work, the known-new chain, organization, evidence, and other writing assignments, you will tell the story of what aspects of your writing have improved and the process that facilitated your improvement.
You should select a minimum of three key terms from the above table; your three terms should be writing skills you feel you have learned and/or improved on over the course of the semester. A useful way to approach the selection process is to gather together all the writing you have done so far and look them over while also considering the key terms. Once you have identified your best work that represents your key terms, give some thought to your in-class and individual experiences when you completed your work.
Your portfolio will take the form of a page on the course Scholar Blogs website and you will use the WordPress web publishing tool to compose your page. In the coming weeks, we will spend time setting up your Scholar Blogs account, reviewing how to access your page, how to write your page, add media, links, and discussing some of the ways you might organize your page’s content. During this time, we will also read chapters and complete assignments from our course text, Portfolio Keeping: A Guide for Students.
Toward the end of the semester, you will use this collection as evidence to argue in a reflective essay that you have achieved the learning outcomes for the course. Idea prompts for the reflective essay are available on Course Reserves.
Please save your reflection letter as a PDF file and upload it at the bottom of your webpage using the “Add Media” option. Be sure to alert potential readers to its presence (see above example).
Due date is May 5, 2017. Please complete your site by 11:59pm. After this time, I will close access to the course website and begin my grading period.
The grading rubric can also be found on Course Reserves.