Your final portfolio project will be a website describing and discussing the writing practices you developed in this class. Over the course of this session, you will develop a variety of important skills. The portfolio is your opportunity to concretely demonstrate your mastery off those skills. Because only some skills will be evident in any given project that you complete for the course, you need to provide a sampling of all your work in this course to demonstrate what you've accomplished as a reader, writer, thinker, learner. In general, the portfolio provides you an opportunity to illustrate how you make informed choices as a writer.

Composing Schedule
Optional In-Class Work Day: Mon. 7/16
Draft Due: Classtime Wed. 7/18 (Either online or on disk, zip ok!)
Final Due: Sat. 7/21 midnight

Background
A group of teachers from a variety of colleges and universities developed a list of outcomes for first year composition courses. There are many methods of evaluating student achievement in these outcomes; however, at ASU we choose to use portfolios that allow the student to demonstrate growth over time. This give you, the student, a chance to use mutliple pieces of writing to demonstrate "mastery" of different writing practices.

Because of the increasing importance of the World Wide Web as an information source and because of the nature of this class, I am asking you to construct a website that presents this information instead of presenting it in a text-based format. In addition,

• websites allow you to link to a variety of sources and
• are easy to update if you choose to publish.

Assignment
To complete the portfolio for this course, you will need to save your written work throughout the semester- invention work, drafts of projects, "final" versions of projects, the post-composing reflections on each project, written peer responses, and the like. However, you do not need to submit all of your written work in the portfolio. Rather, you need only submit whatever you consider necessary to demonstrate your accomplishments as a writer. You also need to submit an introduction which you explain what you've chosen to include in the portfolio and what each item in the portfolio demonstrates. For this portion of your introduction, you need to be as detailed as possible, using examples from your writing projects to illustrate your growth as a writer, what you've learned from the invention, peer review, and other activities, and from the final "production" of each writing project. Your introduction should also include a paragraph or two in which you look to the future, commenting on how you plan to use your rhetorical knowledge and your composing skills in your academic, professional, personal, and/or civic lives. Your revision plan should include examples and details of specific changes you'd make in the composition, if you were to revise it.

The Portfolio Project has three components:

First, an introduction that discusses your changes (and, I hope, your growth) as a writer over the course off the semester. The idea here is to both explore and demonstrate in what specific ways you have further developed your reading, writing and thinking skills as you "wrote your way" through this class.

Second, the Portfolio Project asks you to compose a revision plan--how you'd go about revising one of the Writing Projects you constructed during the semester. Keep in mind that you do not do the actual revision; rather, you discuss what you would do if you had the chance to revise the project. Please include the final version of the text with my comments and then, attached to these, a detailed discussion of how you are seeing the paper differently and how you would go about revising it now. Be sure to comment on audience, purpose, goals, and so on for the essay and provide specific examples of what changes you'd like to make.

Third, a table of contents that allows the reader to quickly understand both what you have chosen to include and how you have decided to organize the portfolio. Feel free to organize your portfolio in a creative manner.

Expectations

To construct an effective portfolio, you need to make wise choices as you select written work to illustrate what you've learned and accomplished in this course. To do that, you need to listen carefully to your peers, who can help you decide which pieces of your written work best represent you as a writer, reader, thinker, and learner. While I expect you to have taken some steps toward developing as a writer, some of those steps will be smaller than others. It's unreasonable to expect that all of your strides have been big this semester. Learning to write effectively is a life-long journey. By the end of this semester you will have made a small portion off that journey. Help me see what that portion of the journey has been like by explaining in detail what you've reamed through constructing your writing projects throughout the semester.

Audience
Your final project should address a varied audience; however, the primary audience is the instructor and your classmates.

Format
The final project must be a website regardless of whether or not you choose to publish it. As you
construct your website, keep in mind the issues raised in our discussion of website design. If you have not constructed a website before, please refer to the instructions for creating a website in Netscape Composer.

Invention

You may want to start by reading the Outcomes for First-Year Composition. This can act as a checklist of various writing practices that you may want to highlight in your portfolio. Consider using the questions based on the outcomes statement to help identify documents you'll use in the portfolio.

Cover Letter
The cover letter discusses your change (and, I hope, your growth) as a writer over the course of the semester. The idea is to both explore and demonstrate in what specific ways you have further  developed your reading, writing, and thinking skills as you "wrote your way" through this class.

Record the challenges, frustrations, disappointments, and rewards the course presented for you. Discuss these issues in terms of the course readings, journal writing, peer reviews, class discussions, groupwork, revision, etc. Talk about how you approach writing situations today, using the skills that you acquired this semester.

Explain the contents of the portfolio, and explain why you have chosen the particular writings. (You can also include brief "blurbs" with each specific text to explain why and what the text proves.) The purpose of the cover letter is to allow you the opportunity to evaluate your progress this semester and to draw closure on the course. Make sure you use the "Outcomes for First-Year Composition" as a guide.

NOTE: The length of the cover letter is usually one to two pages (single-spaced).

The following guidelines are meant to help you generate material for your portfolio analysis and  cover letter; they are not meant to suggest an organizing strategy.

1. What does each section in your portfolio reveal to you about your growth as a writer? Are there areas that don't reveal growth? Why? Consider the kinds of writing tasks you've completed as well as how your completed them. Consider also any surprises you find as you review your portfolio.
2. Compare your self-evaluations for each essay. Do you find a pattern? What do these pieces reveal to you about your growth as a writer?
3. Which piece of writing do you feel especially proud of? Why? Which piece of writing are you most disappointed with?
4. Why? If you could revise either your best or worst piece of writing, how would you proceed? (This question should get you thinking about the revision plan portion of the portfolio.)
5.  Discuss how your writing process has changed and developed this semester. Some questions to consider: What invention strategies have worked well for you? What revision strategies have you found helpful or unhelpful? What do you do differently now? What areas do you still want to work on?
6. Discuss the role that reading has played in your writing. How have the models in the texts influenced you? How has reading your classmates' essays helped you? Do you read your own essays with a more critical eye now? Describe how your reading process has changed.
7. How do you plan to continue to develop as a writer? How will the techniques and strategies that you used this semester help you write for other classes as well as outside academe?

• What were your goals at the beginning of the course?
• Consider your accomplishments this term. Discuss your writing process sand the skills you have learned relating to the writing process.
• Which class activities helped you the most to improve your writing skills (introduction to the genre by instructor, readings form textbooks, class discussions about readings, brain storming activities for topics, prewriting prompts, peer reviews, input from instructor [written or oral], editing workshops)?
• What did you find the most challenging in the writing of your four essays? Consider each essay individually, taking into account the finding of the topic, the invention work, the research, and the revision process.
• Have you got any advice for your peers or your instructor?
• What has happened in the course of the semester that will be useful outside of this class?