Length: at least 1000 words (4 pages)
Due date: 12/18
Organize Your Portfolio Website
You should organize the work on your course site into a finished portfolio showing all the work you have done this semester. Make certain that your entire course site looks complete, coherent, and like you’ve given some thought to its overall design and aesthetics. Make sure all the major assignments are available in the menu and that there is also a link in the menu that will take a reader to your sketches and reflection posts.
The reflection essay described below should become the new home (or index) page for your course site and should begin with a note indicating that the site is an archive of the work that you completed as part of ENG101 at Emory University during fall semester 2024. You should link to the course site, so that a reader who is going through your work can easily find out more information about the course you were in.
Here is a post with some helpful resources for editing your website.
Reflection Essay
As you revise and reorganize your site, look back over the writing you’ve encountered and produced this semester. Reread especially the reflection pieces you’ve written over the course of the semester and think carefully about what you have written and how you have changed over the course of the semester. Then draft an essay in which you answer these two sets of questions:
- What is your current writing process? How has it changed since high school? And how you think it should change in the future?
- What are some ways that you have taken risks this semester? Or when have you written something while you were feeling uncertain and/or uncomfortable about the process, structure, or topics you were writing about? How did you respond to this uncertainty? What did you learn from taking these risks and/or from working through that uncertainty?
As you answer these questions, you should analyze specific pieces of writing you undertook for this class. Your essay should include at least three direct quotes from your own writing. (Remember, quotations do not speak for themselves. When you introduce a quotation, you’ll want to spend at least as much time explaining what you want the reader to notice in the quotation — what that quote means in the context of your essay — as you spend quoting the material.) Just like in the other writing assignments you’ve completed this semester, you will need evidence to support of your argument; however, in this case, the evidence you will use is your own writing.
Your essay should be written for two different audiences: the internal audience is this community of learners you have been working with all semester, including me as the instructor as well as your classmates, and then there is an external community that includes the first-year writing assessment committee. That external audience is familar with the learning outcomes for this course but is otherwise unaware of the kinds of writing and reading you’ve been working on. You’ll need to guide those readers a little bit, explaining the structure of the major assignments.
You should address each of the major assignments this semester in your essay:
- The literacy narrative, which you completed in three parts, with instructor feedback, peer editing and opportunities for revision along the way.
- The tracing pages essay.
- Your halfa kucha presentation.
- All the sketch assignments taken together count as one major assignment. You definitely should not try to address each individual sketch assignment, but discuss what you got out of the sketch assignments broadly. Or you might look at one or two particular sketch assignments that you found especially valuable.
Just like with any assignment you’ve completed this semester, your reflection letter should include at least one image (though you can certainly include more than one). You might consider using your Assemblies image as the primary or feature image for your letter — hopefully constructing that chart will help you to think about how the work you have completed this semester fits together, and hopefully it will help to communicate that understanding to your readers.