ENG1101: Final Portfolio & Reflection (Reichert)

Along with your final portfolios, which must include the final revised drafts of each of your major essay assignments as well as the reflections for each, I am asking you to write a Final Course Reflection of at least 1000 words. This, along with the other reflective writings you did over the course of the semester and in your portfolios, is one way we package what we’ve learned into something we can take in to the future and TRANSFER to other writing situations in other arenas of your lives.

To start, consider the following prompts:

• What have you learned about yourself as a reader, writer and scholar this semester?
  • What moments, assignments, readings, conversations, and/or lessons led you think of yourself that way?
• What from this course will you be able to take with you into other parts of your life? How will this transfer enhance or improve your ability in other writing situations?

Like any other essay we’ve written in class, you should write with a balance of argument and evidence. Think of this as an essay you are writing about yourself and your experience in this course. You are making claims about how you’ve grown, and then you should substantiate those claims with evidence from the course. This can be as simple and informal as a narrative explanation of a moment/assignment/conversation in class, or you can more formally quote from your own writing. As I did on each essay, I will be looking to make sure that each of your claims is supported with specific evidence.

Along with the strength of your argument, I will be reading your reflection for evidence that you were paying attention to and absorbing some of the terminology that we used in our (digital) classroom. Terms like audience, discourse communities, rhetoric, analysis, thesis, revision, “down draft,” etc should be part of the case that you’re making that you indeed learned something in this class. This can be a fun and creative assignment, in which you are telling me the story of your time in my class, but it should also reflect the skill that you’ve gained over the course of the semester.

I will be grading you on:

• Argument (Claim + Supporting Evidence)
• Organization (paragraphing and sequence, intro/conclusion)
• Register (what tone should a reflection take?) & Audience
• Length, Grammar/Usage/Spelling, Deadlines