English 101

Portfolio: Your Work for the Quarter

Due Monday, March 19, in class.

Please read and follow these instructions carefully. Your grade for the course depends on it.

Contents

  1. Purpose
  2. Ingredients
    1. Revisions
    2. Self-evaluation essay
  3. Grading
    1. A Note on Grades and Revision
  4. Picking up the portfolio

The Purpose

The basic idea behind the portfolio is that writing is a process, not a one-shot deal. After you’ve written a draft you get feedback from readers, which causes you to change your ideas, re-organize them, rephrase them, provide more evidence or more explanation, and so on. The portfolio allows you to showcase your best work by giving you a chance to incorporate that feedback into a final draft.

The portfolio also allows you to demonstrate your growth as a writer. This is important for you, to help solidify your learning as you go on to other courses, and for me, to guide me in reading your finished work.

The Ingredients

Your portfolios will include the following elements:

Any essay missing the previous, graded draft will not be graded. I’ll just give it the same grade it already got.

Put your Portfolio in a neat manila envelope. Put the following information on the outside cover:

Clearly label the essays (“Essay I Revision,” “Essay I Graded Draft,” “Self-Evaluation Essay,” and so on).

Revisions

Revisions should respond to my comments with substantial changes, not just correcting the occasional spelling error or rephrasing a sentence or two. They should provide evidence of serious re-thinking and willingness to question every aspect of the essay in order to make it better: the reasoning, the evidence, even the thesis itself; also any aspect of the presentation (organization, paragraph structure, sentence structure). Revision can also include revising an earlier essay to work on issues we dealt with later. For example, you might want to work on paragraph structure in Essay I, or make it more concise, even though we didn’t address those issues until later. Finally, revisions should be as error-free as you can make them: spelling, punctuation, grammar, and so on all should be as perfect as possible.

Revisions must follow the same formatting requirements as the first drafts (typed, double spaced, no extra space, pages numbered with your name on them, and so on).

Self-evaluation essay

Write an essay which makes a claim about your growth, or lack thereof, as a writer this quarter, citing as evidence specific examples with page numbers from the essays and making reference to any other relevant material from the quarter (your prewriting, peer reviews, in-class work, assigned readings, etc.).

The essay should focus primarily on the main ideas of the class:

In addition, you may consider the surface aspects of writing, such as concision, paragraph structure, or grammar, when appropriate. But the focus should be on the main ideas.

There are two basic purposes for this assignment:

  1. to give you an opportunity to reflect carefully and in a focused, organized way on your own process and growth as a writer, as a means to reinforce that learning, and
  2. to give you an opportunity to apply your writing skills to a familiar topic, showing your work at your best.

Here are two possible ways you might choose to organize your essay. These are just examples; feel free to use a different approach.

Example 1
  1. An introductory paragraph including a brief summary of your work in this class and an explanation of how your writing has changed over the quarter.
  2. Three paragraphs, each dealing with one of your revised papers, starting with the strongest. Each paragraph would include specific examples drawn from the essay, illustrating specific ways that your writing has changed during this course.
  3. If necessary, additional issues or topics, including persistent problems in your writing, visits to the writing studio, or other information pertinent to the topic of your writing.
  4. A brief conclusion re-stating the thesis and summing up the main points in support.
Example 2
  1. An introductory paragraph discussing one or two of the main areas in which you feel you have improved as a writer (style, use of evidence, paragraph structure, grammar, etc.).
  2. A series of paragraphs, one for each of the main areas identified in the introduction. Each paragraph would include specific examples drawn from any or all of your essays, showing how that area had improved over the quarter.
  3. If necessary, additional issues or topics, including persistent problems in your writing, visits to the writing studio, or other information pertinent to the topic of your writing.
  4. A brief conclusion re-stating the thesis and summing up the main points in support.

However you organize the essay, remember that it must prove its thesis. The thesis must be some statement about your development as a writer. It must be backed up with illustrations and explanation.

The self-evaluation essay should follow the same formatting rules as the essays, including a title.

Grading

Each essay will be graded according to the same criteria that were used for the first draft. This will include an assessment of how well you responded to my comments on that draft.

Reminder: In order to receive a grade of 2.0 or higher in this class, Essays I, II and III must all receive a 2.0 or higher. In other words, while homework, the self-reflective essay and the in-class exam can boost a grade that exceeds a 2.0, they cannot raise a grade from below 2.0 to above 2.0. This is because the 2.0 grade represents minimum competence in writing skills required to move on to the next level class. That minimum competence can only be demonstrated through the essays.

The self-evaluation essay will be graded according to the following criteria:

Here is the percentage of the final grade that each paper will be worth:

Essay I 25%
Essay II 25%
Essay III 25%
Self-evaluation essay 10%
Homework 10%
In-class exam 5%
Reminder: As stated in the syllabus, the in-class exam will count for just 5% of the course grade—but, if your performance significantly departs from that in your portfolio, your grade for the course may be affected, on the grounds that your ability to write without significant outside help is central to the course.

A Note on Grades and Revision

Students sometimes worry that their grade will go down on the revision. Generally speaking, this is not going to happen. Here’s my promise to you: if you make a good faith effort, your grade will not go down. By “good faith effort” I mean that your revision must involve substantial changes addressing the comments on the first draft. Even if those changes end up making the essay worse (which almost never happens, by the way), the worst that will happen is that your grade will remain the same.

There is only one way your grade on a revised paper can be worse than on your first graded draft. That is if you hand in an essay that has not been significantly revised—one that ignores the comments and just makes a few superficial changes, like spelling and grammar corrections. This would amount to handing in essentially the same essay that I’ve already graded. My comments always address more fundamental issues having to do with the big ideas (the thesis, the counter-argument, illustrations and explanations, etc.). Revisions must attempt to resolve the problems or issues that those comments identify. If you hand in a paper that ignores those comments, you will have demonstrated a failure to comprehend the most fundamental idea of this course (that writing is about revision), and your grade will reflect that lack of comprehension.

The exact meaning of “substantial” depends on the paper being revised. Obviously, a draft that received a 3.9 requires less revision than one that received a 1.9.

Picking up the Portfolio

I will keep the Portfolios for one quarter (not counting Summer). You may pick yours up during my regular office hours, which will be posted on my office door (5355) and on my home page, or by special appointment if you make arrangements with me ahead of time. (I’m often in my office at other times, so drop by if you’re in the building.) If you have not picked up your Portfolio by the end of next quarter, I will recycle it.