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Portfolio with Take-Home Exam
Purpose
By collecting
the writing that you have done to produce the Final
Text, you will have an opportunity to reflect upon the process
of composing a text, but more specifically the choices that you made during
this process to produce the text that you did. Through the development
of this portfolio you will be asked to re-visit and reflect upon the work
you did to compose the Final
Text.
Instructions-Collection
For the portfolio, you will want to collect the work that you did to compose the following texts:
This should include relevant homework (such as the Progressive Annotated Bibliography, and maybe the Rhetorical Analysis and the Grammar Analysis), rough drafts, and evaluated final drafts. You may also include anything else that you want the instructor to reference while reading your Take-home exam.
The purpose of the Take-home exam is for you to demonstrate what you have learned throughout the semester by explaining how you applied this material to the composition of your Final Text.
Instructions-Writing
After re-visiting and reflecting upon the work that led to the composition of the Final Text, you will want to compose a 1000-1250 word essay in which you describe the decisions that you made to compose this text. Essentially, you want to answer the question: "Why do you think this will be an effective text?" To support your answer you will want to use the concepts that you have been taught throughout the semester, as well as specific references from your Final Text that illustrate your point. Stronger papers will also draws from other sources, such as the textbook to talk about the course concepts. Some of you may feel that the word limit is too short for this discussion; if this is the case, then you will have to make some rhetorical decisions about what is most important.
Criteria
Logistic:
- 1000-1250 words
- single-spaced or double-spaced
- Due December 12, 2008
- 250 points
The instructor will use what you have written for the Take-home exam to evaluate your submission of the Final Text. While the Take-home exam will be evaluated on its own merit to determine how well you can write about the decisions you made to compose the Final Text, it will also be used to determine whether you performed what you said you did. For example, if you state that you learned that your target audience does not have good access to computer technology and you create a web text, then you will do well on the Take-home exam for demonstrating this awareness, but poorly on the Final Text for not composing a text that is effective for your target audience.
In addition to the general evaluation criteria, the instructor will be looking for evidence of...
- an understanding of your own writing. Can you talk competently about what you decided to do and why?
- an understanding of the course material and how it applies to your own writing? Are you concepts correctly? Are you illustrating your use of that concept with examples from your Final Text?
- an understanding of your audience, the instructor. Have you demonstrated an understanding of the course concepts in an appropriate manner?
- an appropriate persona; this means you should adopt a professional tone and publish a well-edited paper
- an understanding of the composing decisions that you made. Does your text comply with what the instructor will see in your Final Text.
- appropriate use of conventions, if relevant, MLA, APA, or an appropriate citation formatting