The purpose of a Portfolio in any workshop/studio course — whether art, music, or writing — is to allow the student who has been practicing and honing his/her skills to display the best work of those skills. Because this course is not an advanced course for majors, however, your portfolio should also display all the relevant work you've done this semester so that your reader/evaluator has the evidence he needs in order to award you the grade that work deserves.

Your Porfolio should be a sturdy, three-ring binder with the following clearly-divided sections:

Section 1	Analytical Cover Letter
Section 2	Final Drafts of 3 Essays/Projects (include a brief cover note to remind me of audience/purpose for each piece)
Section 3	Unit 1 Archive (1 early draft with peer review, 1 draft with teacher's comments) Unit 2 Archive (1 early draft with peer review, 1 draft with teacher's comments) Unit 3 Archive (1 early draft with peer review, 1 draft with teacher's comments)
Section 4	Six Research Reflections (from Packets 1 - 3)
Section 5	Other (include a sample of your "research" work that you think you did especially well; this may include a copy of your interview questions and/or responses, your annotated bibliography, your annotated artifact list from Project 2, your early blog postings — what ever pieces of text YOU think you did your best on.)

The Porfolios are due according to the scheduled due dates. Portfolios will be accepted ONLY if they are turned into Professor Banks in person. Students must sign-off that they have delivered their portfolios.

Portfolio Cover Letter

Just as a cover letter would accompany a business portfolio or proposal, just as a cover letter would accompany a resume and letters of recommendation, just as a cover letter accompanies professional writing sent to publishers, so too will your portfolio contain a cover letter.  I consider you all writers, and since you’re requesting something from me (evaluation of how your work has progressed), you must ask for it in your cover letter. 

So far, you have written analytical cover memos for each of your three major projects and three major essays. Therefore, you should have had extensive practice at analysis (if you've done your work as I asked you to), and you should also have much (though not all) of the material you will need to write this analysis of your work. You goal here is to answer the following questions in excessive detail:

• How have your three major essays been revised this semester? Where did they start? What changes occurred? Who made what suggestions? How did you use those suggestions? Why? Which suggestions did you refuse? Why? How did you use class activities to revise your projects? Why? What effect did using published models of your choosing have on your projects? Why?
• How do your finished drafts address their respective audiences? Who are those audiences and what do you think their needs/desires/interests are? How do your revisions take that audience's concerns into account? Why?

Your first paragraph should introduce YOU to ME and explain what I'll be finding in this portfolio. Your last paragraph should explain what GRADE your work has earned as demonstrated by the artifacts in this portfolio (not for how hard you work or how much you've shown up to class; although that's part of the assessment rubric, it is not all). After you have carefully addressed the questions above, you should be in a place for "self-evaluation." I have also posted an assessment rubric to the web; you should assess your own work based on those common outcomes for the course. You should measure your portfolio against the assessment rubric, using language from that document to locate your work in the grade category you think it falls; your ability to do this effectively demonstrates, yet again, your analytical skills.

Your cover letter must be a minimum of two (2) typed, single-spaced pages, and it must be in a formal letter style (date, inside address, salutation, close, signature), Times New Roman 12-pt. font.

Sample Analytical Portfolio Letters

The links here are to sample letters that other students have written for other portfolio classes. That are not "perfect" and I do not give them to you to copy, but they are quite effective in meeting the assignment. Therefore, they should be useful models to give you an idea of what you might do with your own projects.

• Sample One
• Sample Two

These letters were initially written for English 1100 at ECU or English 101 at Illinois State University by former students of mine. I have their permission to post these to use for instructional/educational purposes.