Courses:

Our semester together is drawing to a close, and it is time for you to begin the process of review, reflection, and re-vision necessary to prepare your portfolio of your work of the semester to submit to me so that I can assign you a grade for the course. The following guidelines are to help you to make sure your portfolio is complete and arranged in a way that will facilitate my review of your work.

Here is what your portfolio must contain, and in this order:

• Your profile of yourself as a writer and reader negotiating the identities to which you lay claim, assigned on the first day of class, with my responses.
  
  
• Your four essays, in the order that you wrote them: for each, first submitted version (with my responses), revision (with my responses), and subsequent revision(s), if any.
  
  Note: Substantive re-visions of your work are welcome and encouraged and, if genuinely successful, could raise your grade somewhat. Revisions will not in any case lower your grade, so you risk nothing in choosing to re-write, and grades aside, you stand to learn more from the revision process-always the real reason to do it. If you decide to do additional revisions, they should be inserted after the earlier revised and responded-to version. Even if you decide not to do any substantive revisions, you must go through the last version of each essay and correct any editing problems (my responses and the check marks in the margins will be your guide).
  
  
• Your Reader's Notebook: Responses to all assigned reading (with my responses, as applicable), arranged in chronological order as assigned, with full bibliographic entry as heading for each and with pages numbered, plus your response to the reading, lecture, or other relevant event(s) you attended. You can make sure your Notebook is complete by checking the assignment schedule for the semester.
  
  Then, for your final writing assignment of the semester, I would like you to return to the scrutiny of yourself as a writer and reader negotiating identities with which we began the semester and to write another profile of yourself now, after this semester of work, learning, and practice. What identities have you addressed in your writing? How has your experience of the course and the writing you have done for it invited you to consider, or re-consider, your identities: as a woman or man, a person of a particular race or ethnicity or nationality, of a sexual identity or orientation, as a scientist, a reader, a person of faith (or not), a citizen of the twenty-first century? To prepare for your self-scrutiny, re-read the course syllabus, the handout on the Reader's Notebook, and the writing workshop guidelines you were given at the start of the semester as well as all the writing you've done this semester, as assembled above. With the course goals and processes and the work you've done fresh in your mind, ask yourself the following questions and address them in your profile: What sort of writer would you call yourself now? What have you learned about writing and reading this semester? What does "identity" mean to you now? What are you proud of as you look through your portfolio? What remains for future efforts? Your claims, of course, should be ones your portfolio can support and give evidence of, though you certainly can claim to have learned about some aspect or feature of writing which you believe you have not yet mastered. What aspects of writing do you think you still need to work on? And last, what do you foresee for yourself as a writer in the future? What would you like to accomplish in your writing, and how do you intend to go about accomplishing your writing goals? How do you expect to continue to draw on what you've learned in this course in the writing you will do in the future?
  
  
• Finally, prepare a brief Introduction and Conclusion to your portfolio (your "Collected Works"!), number the pages of the portfolio sequentially throughout (numbering in ink by hand is okay), and then prepare a Table of Contents. Title your collection if you care to. Please be sure that everything in the portfolio is labeled (Essay I, Revised, etc.). And remember: no class notes, no handouts, no extraneous "stuff" is to be included in the portfolio. Place your portfolio securely in something that will hold it together-not in a manila file folder, in other words! Also be sure your name is clearly legible on the outside cover of the portfolio.
  
  In assessing your work and assigning grades, I will first check for completeness of your portfolio (all requirements must be met satisfactorily for a grade of C or better) and review your record of attendance in class, your preparedness for class (including workshops), your engagement and effort, active and interested participation, and timely submission of the portfolio and of all assignments, notebook, and other assigned work. The primary determinant of your grade will be the quality of your written work.

Your completed portfolio is due at our final class meeting in Session 25.

No late portfolios, please!

As always, I'm happy to answer any questions you may have. I hope you will enjoy the process of reflection, review, and re-vision which preparing your portfolio will entail, and I look forward to reading your work.

Student work appears courtesy of the authors listed below: