my task is : Portfolio: Reflection and Revision
Adapted from “Revision and Reflection” by Heather Lindenman, Martin Camper, Lindsay Dunne Jacoby, and Jessica Enoch
Revision and reflection are important aspects of your growth as writers and learners, and they are some of the main methods you can use to gain authority and take control of your writing. Being able to take a step back and examine your own successes and shortcomings—and being able to recognize what to fix and how—will allow you to continue to grow and be successful in writing situations throughout your life.
In this final portfolio, you’ll look back on all of your writing from this semester and all of the feedback you’ve received from your peers and your instructor. Search for moments of success and struggle and decide which essays you would most want to revise further. Your final portfolio will contain four of your essays from the semester PLUS a one-page single-spaced memo that explains the changes you made in your revisions and why.
Choose 4 from these essays:
1. Writing experiences
2. An early reading experience
3. Compare & Contrast
4. Process
5. Concept
6. Analysis of an article
7. Position essay
Use feedback from your peers, from the CTL, and me to help you think about what changes you might want to make. However, the decision about what to change is your own, and you should have a clear sense for yourself of why you want to make these revisions. You will be graded on how substantive the revisions are, as well as on their ultimate success. (Of course, you are trying to make the essay better, but the goal here is to try something radically different, even if it fails.) Your decision about what to revise should be based on a strong rational thought process, which you will explain in the memo.
Substantive revision involves major changes to the ideas and structure of an essay. While grammar and style are important and you should focus on fine-tuning the essay at the end of the process, you won’t succeed on this assignment if you only focus on grammatical and sentence-level changes.
Substantive revisions can include but are not limited to:
● Addition of examples, evidence, facts, logos/ethos/pathos appeals, etc.
● Deletion of material that might not fit or achieve your purpose as well
● Substitution of new (more effective) ideas, evidence, etc. for old ones
● Changing your audience, point of view, or position
● Rethinking your focus/purpose/thesis
● Restructuring/reordering the essay to help clarify or strengthen the ideas
The memo: Why did you go and do that?
Your memo should guide me through your revision process; it will be key in helping me understand your changes—and thus key in my assessment of your portfolio. In the memo, you need to clearly explain your goals for the revision, explain what you changed, and explain why you changed it. You need to include specific details from your essays to support your discussion. This means
1) Explaining why you chose this essay to revise and what you wanted to happen to the essay in revision.
2) Pointing out (through quotes, paraphrases, summaries) what you changed. Be as specific as possible!
3) Explaining why you made the changes. What did each change add, clarify, augment, refocus? How do you think it helps achieve your goals?
Example:
“I created an emotional appeal in my Position Essay by offering a detailed description of my great-grandmother’s work as an indentured laborer in a button factory in Detroit (see page 2, paragraph 1). I added this to help readers understand some of the hardships that immigrants in America faced in the early 1900s. Without a clear, vivid description of her experience, readers might not understand how difficult it was and might not care as much about the issue.”
Grading criteria:
● 40%: Include four excellent essays (10% per essay)
● 40%: Revise the four essays (10% per essay)
o 0-15 points = minimal revision (sentence-level changes)
o 15-30 points = some revision (adding in new evidence/examples/explanation; taking out irrelevant material; reordering the essay; rethinking the focus/theme of the essay somewhat)
o 30-40 points = substantial revision (adding and removing large amounts of material; reordering/restructuring the essay in a substantial way; rethinking the focus/theme of the essay in a major way)
● 20%: Write a reflective memo
Your memo will be graded on how clearly you explain your goals for the revision, how specifically you describe the changes you made, and your explanations of why you made these changes. It will also be graded on accuracy—does your discussion reflect the actual revisions you made?
after reading that i will send you my 4 essays
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