Portfolios are due Thursday, Dec. 13 at 8 pm. You may still make minor edits until about 8 am in the morning on Dec. 14, but the portfolio must be essentially done and posted by the evening of Dec. 13 or you will receive an incomplete in the class until your portfolio can be read at the beginning of next semester. Please be in touch with me by email on Thursday if your portfolio will be a few hours late. I will email everyone once I see your portfolio is complete, or if I see any glaring omissions I’d like you to fix before Friday morning. Feel free to email me if I neglect to do so.

Here’s what you need to do to accomplish that:

Your portfolio will consist of a cover letter plus three essays (chosen from Essays 1, 2, 3, and 4). Once you have some feedback on your Essay 4 (which I’ll try to give by the end of this week, Dec. 7), decide which of your four essays you’d like to put in your portfolio. To make your decision, you may want to look at the rubric that will be used to assess your portfolio. Feel free to check with me if you’d like some advice on what to include, but the decision is yours.

The fourth essay (the one that will not be in your portfolio) can be turned in (if it hasn’t already been graded) as late as noon on Friday, Dec. 21

Now focus on revisions you may want to make for the three portfolio essays. With time limited, the three areas I’d suggest you focus on are these:

• grammar and usage issues as marked on your final drafts with yellow highlights for online class
• focus at both essay and paragraph (topic sentences) levels
• research skills (format of Works Cited and in-text citations)

If you have additional time, you may want to do more revision, based on comments on both rough and final drafts.

Consider the order of pieces in your portfolio. The cover letter, of course, will come first. Essays do not need to be presented in the order they were written; generally the advice is to start with your strongest piece. If you haven’t done so already, try to come up with a descriptive title for each essay, to give yourself a way to refer to the essays in your cover letter and also to focus the essay and engage the reader.

The next step is to compose a cover letter for your portfolio. Instructions and sample student essays from previous semesters are here. Discuss your essays in the order you will present them. I will not require that you turn in a rough draft of this letter, but I’d be glad to give you feedback if you want. For most students, it is a relatively easy task. Do remember that it is one of your portfolio pieces, so it should demonstrate your writing abilities of organization, focus, and development. It may also be a place to highlight your personal voice and sparkling wit.

IMPORTANT: Here’s a video from a previous semester (the outside looks different, but looks the same from dashboard) that goes over some of these things and shows you how to set up your portfolio on your blog:

 

Portfolio due Date: Thursday, Dec. 13, at 8 pm.