Portfolio with Rhetorical Statement
Purpose
The portfolio is a culmination of the work that you have done this semester. Some of the documents that you produce for the portfolio will be new; others will revisions. The accompanying Rhetorical Statement is your opportunity to explain to the instructor what you have learned from the work that did throughout the course of the semester.
Instructions–Compiling
The Portfolio will include...
- the Progressive Annotated Bibliography (evaluated entries with new introduction) *
- the Project Proposal (evaluated draft)
- the Research Plan (evaluated draft)
- the Data Analysis (evaluated draft)
- the Genre & Audience Analysis (evaluated draft)
- the Final Document and (evaluated draft and revised final copy)*
- the Rhetorical Statement *
- any other documents that you find relevant to this corpus of texts
* indicates an inclusion of new or revised documents
Organize these documents and place them into a manila folder (or a self-addressed stamped manila envelope if you want the evaluated portfolio prior to next semester).
Instructions–Rhetorical
Statement
For this two to three page single spaced document, you will compose a statement to the instructor explaining the rhetorical decisions that you made when you composed the documents for this project. As you draft this document think about it as a way for you to guide the instructor through the evaluation of your documents. Therefore, you will want to...
- briefly explain, in your own words, what this semester long project was designed to teach you. You will be using the rest of this document to explain how you did or did not accomplish the goals of this project. Think of this as an argument that you will be proving throughout this document.
- discuss
the final document; address the following questions:
- what type of document did you create? Why?
- who was the target audience? why?
- how did you negotiate between the audience and the instructor as audience? Illustrate your answer with an example from your document.
- what was the purpose of your document? why?
- how did you fulfill this purpose? You may want to discuss this in terms of the rhetorical appeals (ethos, pathos, logos). Which ones did you use and why? Illustrate your answer to these questions with examples from the text.
- how did the context that you wrote in affect the composition of the document?
- how
was the final document informed by your research? Illustrate your
answer with an example from your document.
- discuss
the process of the overall project; address the following questions:
- what
did you learn from designing a research project? doing the research?
analyzing the data? and reporting the process? Illustrate your answer
with an example from your experiences
- what
did you learn from designing a research project? doing the research?
analyzing the data? and reporting the process? Illustrate your answer
with an example from your experiences
- discuss
your writing process throughout the advanced composition course; address
the following questions:
- what did you learn about writing from your advanced composition course?
- describe the progress that you see in your writing from the first documents that you wrote to the last documents. Instead of revising all of your documents, this is where you explain how your experience and feedback for one document shaped how you responded to the next ones. If you do not feel you made any progress, speculate why.
- how did you use the feedback that you got from both your instructor and your peers. This is your opportunity to respond to the feedback that you received. You may want to choose a few prototypical or non typical examples to respond to.
- from
your overall experience in this advanced composition course, what
do you think will be most applicable in your future writing? why?
In the rhetorical statement, make sure that you do NOT just summarize all of the documents that the instructor will be reading in your portfolio. This does not give the instructor any new information about your documents.
Do not just use these points as a check list you use to organize your Rhetorical Statement. Instead, think about these points as topics that should be covered (if applicable) and compose a cohesively organized argument. Use the RST to think through the issues that you will be discussing in this document.
Finally, do not use this as an opportunity to "butter up" the instructor. The instructor will be more impressed by critical self-reflection than flattery.
Criteria
The Portfolio is due on April 26, 2005. Please bring it to office (BAL 313) at the ODU main campus or submit it to the appropriate coordinator at your site.
The Portfolio will be worth 400 points.
In addition to the general evaluation criteria, the instructor will be looking for evidence of...
- a complete portfolio
- critical
self-reflection in the rhetorical statement. In other words...
- an understanding of rhetoric
- an understanding of literacy
- a meta-awareness of one's own writing and writing process
- an understanding of your own rhetorical decisions without simply summarizing
- a sense of audience–can you intelligently talk to the instructor about your own writing
- other documents that fulfill their respective criteria
- an appropriate use of conventions, including MLA or APA citation formatting (if applicable)
last.updated 01.11.05