English 3301

Mid-Term Portfolios:  Due Tuesday, March 11
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Exordium: Imagine that you are me and that at some point, some well-intentioned administrator might wonder about my grading practices. I would like to be able to give her for each student a fair example of the student's work and the student's reflection on what he or she had learned in the course. So imagine that your portfolio is that evidence of the grade that I would like to argue for in response to this well-intentioned administrator.

So: Consider the portfolio as a presentation of what you have done and learned in this class.  Here were my course objectives:

1. To learn about the nature of Composition Studies.  By the end of the course, I want you to have some idea of what we do in our field and the kinds of issues that concern us;
2. To learn something about what genres are and how they function to enable (or disable) writers’ abilities to respond to different kinds of rhetorical situations;
3. To improve your writing;
4. To improve your friendship with writing.  By the end of the course, I want you to be more in touch with who you are as a writer, with how writing can help you know more about yourself and others, with how you can use writing to connect with each other and in some sense collaboratively reorganize your worlds. 

I understand that I have not focused on Objective 2 and to a limited extent on Objective 1. We have mostly enacted in this class learning by doing. We have read, thought, and written—and exchanged our thoughts in forums, collectively creating new knowledge. I am hoping that in this kind of natural exchange of writing in response to readings and in writing brief essays (whatever an essay is) and responding to each other’s essays, we have enjoyed writing. That’s #4. I am quite certain that if we have moved forward on #4, we will have enacted #3.

With that in mind, I have created some categories to which you can respond. Please look at the pages to the right, beginning with "Attendance."