What you should include . . .

1. Summaries

• Xerox of 3 pages from an essay from College Knowledge that demonstrate annotation
• Summary outline of article
• Summary and response

2. The Learning Process

• Final learning journal about yourself as a reader and a learner. You will listen to your earlier tape and another tape you make reading an article and comment on what has changed. This journal should also include your a comparison of your LASSI results gathered early and late in the quarter. Be sure to attach both sets of LASSI scores.
• All previous learning journals in which you highlight what you think are the most important insights about your learning

3. Note taking

• Textbook: read, annotate, and provide useful study notes from a textbook chapter
• Lecture: a good set of lecture notes with the recall clue column completed

4. Writing Drafts: all drafts and all forms of feedback from writing assignments—your own and the ones your peers have marked up to help you, all the comments we’ve returned on drafts, revisions, etc.

5. Best Writing Polished and Analyzed: Select the best essay you’ve written and revise it to be better still. Then provide a cover letter which introducing it as an illustration of who you are as a writer. The letter provides specific examples of what you can do in college writing and of your own particular strengths as a writer; moreover, the letter should show with examples your improvement relative to other drafts in the portfolio. Finally, the letter should suggest what areas you would like to work on in future writing courses or with further practice.

6. Vocabulary application: highlight in one color throughout the portfolio your use of the new vocabulary you have developed; we expect to see + 10 words in the collection.

How you should arrange it . . .

First, select 1 of the 4 essays (admirable person, summary and response to bell hooks, comparison of Socrates to Irene, and essay on education) and continue revising that one during the week of March 8-12, working it to near perfection; that is, select better textual evidence and discuss it more thoroughly, reduce your use of “to be” verbs (am, is, are, was, were), combine choppy sentences, make all sentences more forceful and direct, demonstrate your command of new punctuation—the : and the ; —and of a collegiate vocabulary. Separate the highly polished revision from all its earlier drafts.

Second, assemble all drafts, cover memos, peer responses, and whatever else contributed to the polished presentation of these essays. Comb through these documents for ideas and changes that appear in your polished revision, and highlight the ideas you incorporated. For example, if one of your peer annotators gave you a good idea, highlight it on the revised draft. If you did what we suggested in our comments, highlight the advice you took to improve the writing. All this review activity compels you look closely at your writing and decide whether or not it has changed in response to course activities.

Third, make another tape of yourself reading and listen to it and to the tape you made in the first week of the quarter. Then assemble the learning process section of the portfolio.

Fourth, develop a professional presentation of the material. This collection of your work earns more points than any single assignment (up to 250), so it behooves you to TAKE PRIDE IN IT. You may certainly decorate your cover.

A) Purchase or borrow a clasp-type folder (also called a report cover), which is expandable so it holds all your work.

B) 3-hole punch all your papers.

C) Use 1 ½” left margin on polished work but not previous drafts.

D) Separate the collection with dividers telling us what part we’re reviewing: summary, note-taking, learning process, drafts, and polished, analyzed writing.

E) Manually number all the pages of the “learning” sections (learning journals and essay drafts) so it’s easier for you to point our your development in your letter and for us to see the proof of that development.

Finally write a letter of introduction for your portfolio to do these things: 1) examine your writing process—what can you do better as a writer than you could before, and what pages and highlights should we examine for evidence; 2) express judgment about your writing—telling which essay you think is strongest and why; 3) talk about your own learning process and style; 4) discuss your skill at summary writing and note-taking, showing what you have achieved through paying close attention to assigned readings and course habits. The strongest letters use examples from drafts and revisions and display these in reader-friendly ways. At the climax of this course, you are developing a presentation about yourself as a collegiate reader, writer and learner and using your work as textual evidence to support your claim. You may use either this letter or your autobiographical poem to start your portfolio. If you choose the poem, then put your letter at the end of the polished pieces.

When you should submit it . . . and expect it back . . .

Friday, March 12 . . . during our final exam, Thursday, March 18