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Arkansas State University

Composition I Portfolio Guidelines

A portfolio is the culmination of the work you’ve put in throughout the semester: It’s a way to show off all that you’ve done and all that you’ve learned. But more than that, the act of putting together a portfolio is an important reflective process. It helps you draw connections between lessons throughout the work of Composition I and envision possibilities for the future.

This final assignment for the course asks you to look back on the writing you’ve composed throughout the semester, along with both your peers’ and instructor’s responses to your writing, as well as all of your reflective assignments, to identify moments of writing success and struggle. One goal of this assignment is for you to leverage this knowledge to revise at least one assignment of your choosing, and/or potentially all of your major projects. In addition to this revision, you will also compose a reflective memo that (1) discusses what you’ve learned about academic writing and yourself as an academic writer over the course of the semester, and (2) details the changes you’ve made in the revision project and the reasoning behind these changes.

What belongs in your portfolio? In order:

A cover page
A table of contents
A new reflective memo (see guidelines)

Unit 1:

A literacy narrative reflection & a description of what changes you made in revision
A final draft of your literacy narrative
Process work for your literacy narrative (e.g., if you took planning notes on a piece of notebook paper, you could photograph that and include it; if you have a full first draft, include it; if you have other documents that demonstrate the work you put into revising it, include them)

Unit 2:

A rhetorical analysis reflection & a description of what changes you made in revision
A final draft of your rhetorical analysis
Process work for your rhetorical analysis

Unit 3:

A choose-your-own-genres reflection & a description of what changes you made in revision
A genre justification statement (2–3 paragraphs): Why did you pick these genres? What work do they do, individually and together? What audiences do they let you reach? Did your vision for these projects meet the reality of your product? What are the affordances of these genres, and how do you engage them? What affordances were you not able to engage? Given the chance to go back to the beginning of this project, would you pick the same genres/media?
A final draft of your choose-your-own-genres projects
Process work for your choose-your-own-genres projects