Justin J. Bain
PhD Student in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric
Syracuse University
315-443-1412
jjbain@syr.edu
WRT 105: Portfolio
• Philosophy
• Writing 105
• Writing 205
• Writing 307
• Writing 110WRT 105: Portfolio
This is your final unit—congrats, you’re almost done! If you’ve never done a portfolio before, this is your chance to be creative, to be inventive, and to reexamine your semester. The portfolio asks you to look back over the work you have done—and not done—over the course of this semester, and it asks you to say something about that work. This is not your typical "I tried my best" end of the year reflection: to be honest, those aren’t very interesting to read. Instead, the portfolio asks you to make some claims about your work this semester and to assemble some documents that support those claims. Much of your work this semester has been about using evidence, so this assignment should be a snap.
So, what goes in a portfolio? You’ve done quite a bit of reading inside and outside of class, you’ve done some talking in class with me and with other students, you’ve thought about paper topics, struggled with them, and produced some essays. You’ve also taken notes, dealt with my comments and assignments, reread notes, written in-class essays and done quick research. All of these things, including the books for the course, photocopies of what you read and what you didn’t, can be part of your portfolio.
Along with some of that stuff, you also need some new writing. This is the place where you make some claims, explain them, and point to places in the stuff above that supports your claims. You should be looking for patterns or relations among your old work to make claims about as opposed to solitary instances. Here are some possible topics to make claims about:
1. Changes in how you read texts over the semester or due to types of texts
2. Effects of note-taking or class discussions on your own thinking
3. What can you say about your own writing process over multiple drafts
4. What have you done/not done with comments (mine and others)
5. What can you say about reading/writing/thinking after a semester of college
6. What use you made of homework/classwork
7. Other patterns you see in your writing/thinking/classwork/homework
Okay, the stuff you have been waiting for—a portfolio must be/have:
1) In a 3-ring binder or folder with brads (some sort of folder)
2) Your name on it
3) A table of contents and tabbed or numbered pages
4) 4-5 pages of new writing in the form of essay, poem, narrative, pictures, etc. New writing can come as a single chunk or can be dispersed throughout the portfolio, but either way it has to make 3 or more claims, explain them, and point to places in your portfolio that relate to these claims.
5) 10-20 pages or so of old stuff with highlights, tabs, post-its, or some other indication of the stuff that supports your claims.