TAMIU FYWP ENGL 1301 1

Final Project: Portfolio Website of Your Work

ENGL 1301

Purpose:
We have spent our semester doing quite a bit of analyzing and arguing, and now it is time for you to turn your
attention to analyzing your own work critically. For your final project in this course, you will create a website
that displays the writing you have completed in this course. Your audience for this website portfolio will be the
public in general, and your purpose for this final project is to communicate what you have learned over the
course of the semester.

This portfolio project consists of three parts: the revision of one (1) of your final drafts, the composition of a
final reflection essay that considers your learning across the semester, and the display of key assignments that
document your learning progress in the course.

Tasks:
1. Create a website using a website builder like Weebly or Wix (DO NOT USE Google Sites), and collect and
post the following documents to the website according to a logical system of organization to make a digital
Portfolio:
a. Final Reflection Essay (new)
b. Final Revision of One Writing Assignment (new)
c. For all writing assignment units (there are 3):
• Final Drafts
• Reflection Essays
• First Drafts (submitted as Draft 1)
• Feedback on essays:
o Instructor
o Peer
• 3 Homework / Class Activities from each writing unit (3 x 3 = 9)

Throughout the website, you will also need to draft new explanations (150-200 words per unit writing
assignment) of the work on display and your purposes in displaying the work in order to create cohesion
among the webpages as well as a meta-narrative about your semester-long research project. These
explanations should be written to be understandable to a public audience unfamiliar with the course in order
to explain the processes of academic research and writing and the genres of writing you have produced.
Explanations for each webpage that displays a unit of writing should be 150-200 words.

Things to consider as you craft explanations:

• What are the goals of the unit writing assignments? Who is your audience for each unit writing
assignment?
• What are the genres of the unit writing assignment? How do the genres relate to the artifacts you
analyzed and your purpose in each unit writing assignment?
• What did you learn in each unit writing assignment?

2. Choose one of the writing assignments to revise one final time based on instructor feedback provided on the
assignment’s final draft. Make sure the revised writing assignment meets the minimum passing requirements
described in the original prompt. Once completed, post this revision to your website portfolio and submit it
to the Turnitin drop box in the Final Exam folder in Blackboard.
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3. Compose a 2,000-2,500-word reflection essay that responds to the following questions. Once completed,
post this revision to your website portfolio and submit it to the Turnitin drop box in the Final Exam folder in
Blackboard.
a) What did you learn about the writing process in this course? What activities or homework helped you
understand the writing process and how to do it? How did this learning build upon your knowledge of
the writing process developed in other courses? Give examples, explain, and be specific.
b) What did you learn about analysis in this course? What activities or homework helped you understand
the process of analysis and how to work through it? Give examples, explain, and be specific.
c) What did you learn from the process of revising, once more, one of your essays (a unit writing
assignment)? Describe the choices you made when revising that essay. Identify 2-3 specific elements of
your final draft that you changed based on instructor feedback, in-class activities, or overall course
concepts and explain why and how you made changes.
d) What was the most challenging aspect of revising this essay one last time? Least challenging? Give
examples, explain, and be specific.
e) What choices did you make to communicate course concepts (like the writing process, analysis, genre,
rhetorical situation, etc.) to a general audience on your website? In your unit writing assignment
explanations, how did you make the genre analysis, visual text analysis, and rhetorical analysis
understandable to someone who is unfamiliar with these genres? Identify 2-3 specific elements in your
explanations and explain why and how you used them to communicate effectively.
f) What was the most challenging aspect of this course? What challenges did you face in the analysis and
writing processes? Give examples, explain, and be specific.
g) What was the least challenging aspect of this course? What strengths did you discover in your analytical
and writing skill sets? Give examples, explain, and be specific.
h) Do you feel that this course prepared you to become a part of the academic writing community? Explain
and be specific.

Rhetorical Situations for the Various Components of Your Portfolio:

 Writing Assignment Revision

See the original prompt for guidance on audience, purpose, and genre.

 Final Reflection Essay

Audience
The audience for your reflection essays will be yourself, your professor, and the general public. This means
that you need to embrace the personal pronoun “I” and use it when discussing your learning.

Purpose
The purpose of a reflection essay is to showcase all the writing skills you have learned in the course so that
you can become a better, more confident writer in other writing situations in your university coursework.

Genre
The reflection essay is a personal essay. It is also a formal writing assignment; it should include an
introductory and concluding paragraph to help contextualize your answers to the questions for a public
audience. Also, you should compose at minimum one paragraph per question answered. Remember that you
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are telling your professor and interested members of the general public a story about your learning, so
engage with your storytelling abilities!

The reflection essay should be written in MLA format with an eye toward Standard American English, free
of most grammatical errors. Further, since you are required to provide examples from your assignments in
your reflection essay, you should include in-text citations where appropriate and include references to all of
your cited works in a Works Cited page at the end of your essay.

 Website Portfolio

Audience
The audience for your website portfolio will be yourself, your professor, and the general public. This means
that you need to embrace the personal pronoun “I” and use it when discussing your work for writing
assignments, your reflections, and your website design and purpose.

Purpose
The aim of the website portfolio is to help you take stock of your overall learning in this course by
explaining the course and your work in it to a public audience.

Genre
As with any website, you will need a homepage that orients your audience to the purpose and organization
of the site. It is a good idea to display your final reflection essay on the homepage and explain the theme
you have chosen for your portfolio. In addition to this homepage, you will need multiple pages and sub-
pages for displaying the documents you produced in each writing assignment unit.

On each page and sub-page, you will need to include explanations of the work on display and your purpose
in displaying the work as you have done—these explanations are for a general public audience unfamiliar
with the course, the processes of academic research and writing, and the genres of writing you have
produced. In addition to the compilation of required documents, your website will be graded for its
organizational logic and clarity of explanations for the general audience.

Assessment Criteria:
To earn the minimum grade of a C, your portfolio must…
1. Be in MLA format
2. Be submitted on time
3. Have been peer reviewed in the Final Exam period
4. Meet the word count requirements for Revision and Final Reflection essays and webpage explanations
5. Incorporate feedback from instructor in selected Revision essay
6. Include unit writing assignment explanations for each of the assigned essays
7. Answer reflection questions in the Final Reflection essay
8. Post required documents to website and make those documents and website accessible to a public audience