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ARGUMENT & RESEARCH
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Your ePortfolio: Components and Grading Criteria
WR 39C
Logistical Matters: The submission deadline of your final ePortfolio is [DATE] at 12:00 pm, high noon. To submit your ePortfolio please make it publicly viewable. (We will talk about how to enable the publicly viewable option.)
I. Its Contents
A. The Basics
Required Artifacts:
Reflective Introduction (58 pages, approx. 1500 words minimum) Historical Conversations Project, Graded Version (with or without final grade and comments)
Advocacy Project, Graded Version
While the required elements will give a basic shape to your ePortfolio, the specific details of its organization are yours to construct. Think of your portfolio as a growing archive of evidence that will become full of interesting pieces of evidence as the quarter progresses. You will quickly accumulate artifacts that document your learning. Some of these artifacts will become particularly meaningful. Use them—things like drafts, instructor or peer comments, organizational notes, before and after versions of sentences and paragraphs, final versions of your essays— to document the work you have done, demonstrate your role in your learning, and articulate your intellectual strategies as they pertain to college level rhetoric, composition, and communication.
Be creative and attentive when making choices about organizing the sections and pages in your portfolio. For example, are the compositions going to serve as the primary organizational elements by following the introductory essay in sequential order? Or, are you going to place the compositions and other examples of your best writing together in one “Showcase Writing Section” and organize the other elements of your portfolio in a different manner, along thematic lines (“Revision Strategies,”
“Productive Mistakes”) or in terms of notable developments in your writing (“My Breakthroughs”)?
B. Reflective Introduction (58 pages, doublespaced, approx. 1500 words minimum, 10 pages max) This document introduces you as a collegelevel writer, thinker, and communicator to a community of your peers. Its fundamental purpose is to illustrate the role you have played in your learning over the course of the quarter in 39C. You take responsibility for the quality of your work in this document (and in your ePortfolio) by assessing your performance.
The reflective introduction accomplishes two major objectives: (1) it is an analytically incisive introduction that delivers and substantiates arguments about your development as a writer and communicator; and (2) it offers a balanced analytical assessment of your progress.
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Guiding Suggestions for Writing the Reflective Introduction
The reflective introduction should be an analytically rigorous essay that documents the rich textures of your learning this quarter and perhaps throughout the WR39 sequence of courses (39A, 39B, and 39C). Think of the rest of your ePortfolio as an archive of evidence that you will use in support of the arguments put forward in the introductory essay. Refer to the various pieces of evidence from the archival portion of the portfolio in the introductory essay. Guide the reader to them and clearly explain your artifacts.
The introductory essay should document the progress you have made over the course of the quarter in the following four areas (You may choose to focus on the first three if you cannot address the fourth) :
1. Your Composing Process
Guiding Prompts: You do not need to answer all of the following questions, select those you find useful. Explain what you have learned about the process of generating a researchbased composition.
What have you learned about arranging the elements of your composition? Have you become more skillful and able to control your presentation of evidence and integrate