Your Best (or “Final”) Draft

At the core of your Midterm Portfolio will be the best draft of one of your Writing Projects—not a new one, but one that we’ve already done—polished up and prepared for assessment. This means between now and the due date, you’ll spend some time in assessing your Writing Project, deciding what to focus on, and revising. Remember, one of the standards on the rubric asks for careful revision between drafts—so your readers will be expecting you to rewrite your Writing Project, not just review it. This is the first component of your Midterm Portfolio: a new, revised draft of the Writing Project of your choosing.

If it helps, feel free to think of this as your “final” draft. This draft should be as strong as you can make it, and should be something I haven’t seen before—that is, a new draft that you’ve never turned in.

Your readers won’t just need to see your best draft of your Writing Project; they will need to know where your writing has been. The rubric also asks for you to demonstrate your writing process—so we’ll need to see where your writing has been. In addition to the best draft of your Writing Project, you’ll need to include some information about your process.

Previous Draft

One part of understanding your process is looking at the changes you’ve made in your paper between drafts. Another is looking at how you’ve included readers’ feedback into your revisions. The easiest way for me to see this is by having you include a previous draft of the Writing Project you’ve chosen with my comments on it. That draft will give me a chance to see what changes you’ve made, and also to see how you’ve addressed the issues I’ve pointed out. Your “final” draft, then, should include changes to address the comments I’ve made in that draft.

Additional Material

In addition to your previous draft and my comments, you’ll also want to include some other stuff. Since “other stuff” is a little informal for part of an assignment, let’s call that other stuff “Additional Material.”

If there’s something on the rubric that you think I can’t see in your final paper, you should include something in your Additional Material to demonstrate that skill. I can’t tell you what that something should be, because it’s different for everybody.

Additional Material is optional. It just gives you the opportunity to include stuff in your Portfolio beyond what I’m specifically asking for.

The Reflective Cover Letter: Talking to me.

The other main reader of your Midterm Portfolio is me. What I see in your Writing Project tells me a lot about your writing, but especially at the Midterm, I’m not just interested in your writing. I’m also interested in how you think and feel about your writing, your learning, and this class.

As such, I’ll also ask you to write a brief (1-2 page) Reflective Cover Letter for your Midterm Portfolio. Your Reflective Cover Letter is a chance for you to talk to me about your writing and your progress in this class. There’s not really a way to do this “wrong”—this is, for the most part, the place for you to say whatever you want to say to me about this class and your portfolio. But here are some things you might want to explore:

• What have I learned in this class? What do I still need to learn?
• What do I think is going best in my Portfolio? What still needs the most work?
• What did I learn from the process of revising this paper? What kinds of changes did I make to it from beginning to end, and why? What does that say about me as a writer?
• How do I think about writing differently since the beginning of the semester? What has changed in the way I feel about writing? Do I approach my writing assignments for school differently? Do I think about writing differently in my life outside of school?
• Have our independent reading or personal journal projects made it easier for me to read or write? Harder? Do I enjoy them more than I thought I would? Less? Do I do things differently as a reader or a writer now?

Again, you don’t need to talk about all of these questions—or even any of them, really—but these are the kinds of things I’m most interested in hearing about.

In short, this is about what’s going on in your head. How is the you of today different from the you who sat down in class on the first day? What’s changed, what’s still changing, and what are you wanting to change?

Again, there’s no right or wrong, here—this is just your chance to talk to me.

The Self-Assessment: “Grading” Yourself.

As I’ve said, one of the readers of your portfolio is you. As a part of your Midterm Portfolio, I’ll ask you to fill out the Midterm Portfolio Rubric for yourself. On the day the Portfolio is due, the last thing you’ll do before you turn it in is fill out a copy of the Rubric for yourself. You’ll answer each question just as I will: yes or no, is your Midterm Portfolio demonstrating this skill? There’s no writing for this part. You’ll just use the rubric to take stock of where you are after all the work you’ve done for the Midterm Portfolio.

In short: this is about, in simple, yes-or-no terms, whether your Portfolio meets the requirements of the class.