Length: 1000 – 1250 words (4-5 pages)
Due date: 5/6
Look back over the writing you’ve encountered and produced this semester, and then draft a cover letter for your portfolio that explains how you have met the learning outcomes for this course. This letter is an opportunity to think about your writing and clarify — for yourself and portfolio readers — how your skills and awareness of your writing processes have grown this semester. Think of each piece of writing included in your portfolio as an “exhibit” that you are analyzing and reflecting on in this letter.
What should your letter do?
- Explicitly address the course outcomes and how you encountered them throughout the reading and writing for the course.
- Guide your readers through the exhibits, discussing your writing while looking for larger patterns. What do you see about yourself as a writer when you step back and look at the work you’ve produced this semester?
- Discuss at least one piece of writing in depth, considering the stages of the writing process as it developed. How did you think about audience, purpose, or genre while you wrote this piece?
- Explain how you have applied (or will apply in the future) insights from this course in your other classes or other rhetorical situations. Use specific examples, if possible.
- Employ evidence to support your claims. Just like in the other writing assignments you’ve completed this semester, you will need evidence to support of your argument; however, in this case, the evidence you will use is your own writing.
- Remember that you need to incorporate quotes into your own writing with clear framing language.
- Also remember that you always need your own interpretation and analysis of any quote you use in order for it work as evidence.
- Forms of evidence from your writing exhibits could include, but are not limited to: quotes from your own finished writing (embedded in sentences or longer quotes in blocks); quotes from early drafts of your writing or notes; reported or quoted feedback from others; illustrations or quotations that show how a particular exhibit evolved; or screenshots or images from your work.
Hometasking
Due to the coronavirus physical distancing measures, we had to drop the Kickstarter game design project and instead you completed six #hometasks. As part of your reflection letter, I’d like you to take some time to specifically reflect on what you learned from those tasks, and perhaps what you learned from each other engaging in those tasks as a community together during this challenging time. Did the hometasking assignments help you to convert a “threat mentality” to a “challenge mentality” in McGonigal’s terminology? Did these quests work in the ways that McGonigal describes quests in Superbetter (did you experience any sort of “upward spiral,” for example)? Looking back over your hometasks, what patterns do you notice in the way you approached those assignments? What patterns do you notice in the works of the entire class when taken together? Are there lessons from these tasks that you can apply to writing or other academic tasks in the future?
Publishing your cover letter
The reflection essay should become the new home (or index) page for your course site and should begin with a note indicating that the site is an archive of the work that you completed as part of ENG101 at Emory University during spring semester 2020. You should link to the course site, so that a reader who is going through your work can easily find out more information about the course you were in.
You should organize the work on your course site into a finished portfolio showing all the work you have done this semester. Make certain that your entire course subdomain looks complete, coherent, and like you’ve given some thought to its overall design and aesthetics.
Just like with any assignment you’ve completed this semester, your reflection letter should include at least one image (though you can certainly include more than one. You might consider using your Assemblies image as the primary or feature image for your letter — hopefully constructing that chart will help you to think about how the work you have completed this semester fits together, and hopefully it will help to communicate that understanding to your readers.
