Essentially, your task is to provide a well-supported argument about your growth

Essentially, your task is to provide a well-supported argument about your
growth as a writer and your understanding and/or achievement of the outcomes for the course.
In this essay, you will apply your understanding of rhetoric and your own writing process to
discuss (1) your stance on development as a writer (or lack thereof if that was your experience of
ENG101), (2), how that development (or lack) relates to the texts that you produced over the
course of the semester (your justification), and (3) expansion of that stance through the lens of
analyzing course texts (particularly identifying the rhetorical choices that you made regarding
their initial composition, the revisions you made to them, and your reasons for including them in
the portfolio).
For further explanation on how to think about this assignment, refer to the Contexts,
Definitions, and Rationales section.
Requirements: 2-3 double-spaced pages, Times New Roman 12 pt. font, 1″ margins.
Preparatory Models and Readings:
Chapters 13, 16, and 34 in Norton Field Guide
Contexts, Definitions and Rationale
To demonstrate your growth as a writer, your understanding of your composing process, and
your appreciation of rhetorical choices (particularly your own), you will compose a self-
reflection assessing your complete and polished work, your contributions to the classroom, and
your overall development as a student throughout the course. Certainly, a most important
component of this presentation portfolio is a new composition, the Reflective Introduction, which
makes an argument about what you have or have not learned over the course of the semester as
you provide an overview of your revised work and comments on the processes and feedback that
have contributed to its current status.
The Reflective Introduction’s importance in your portfolio derives from its status as a
metacognitive composition—a text in which you demonstrate that you know about what you
know. Herein you will write about your own writing—the assignments that you had, the original
choices that you made, the comments that you received, and the consequent choices that you
made during revision. This introduction to the portfolio will indicate that you have become a
“reflective” writer, that you can “take a careful look at your own work to identify your patterns,
strengths, and preferences for negotiating writing tasks, for learning new skills, and for putting
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those skills into practice,” particularly in response to the demands of different rhetorical contexts
(Portfolio Keeping 6).
Neither the process nor the substance of this text is foreign to you. You have been engaging in
similar work all semester, as the material in your portfolio will indicate. In this case, you will
apply strategies learned in each of the essays: you will reflect on your writing experiences, you
will use specific details to describe what you can observe about your writing, you will inform
your readers about your writing processes and your written work, you will analyze and evaluate
your texts, and you will apply all of these strategies as you argue your growth or lack of growth
over the course of the semester. You will make judgments about your writing, which will
culminate in overall (self)assessment or claims about your performance. Most of you will likely
give yourself a positive assessment. And you should. But the actual assessment is not as
important as the text by which you convey that assessment. Even if you judge yourself to have
performed poorly and to have minimally developed (or even regressed!), you could compose an
effective Reflective Introduction that clearly and powerfully argues that performance and the
reasons behind it.
The quality of the Reflective Introduction depends on how well you demonstrate an
understanding of rhetoric and your own writing processes and how well you use evidence from
your own texts to support your thesis. This text stands as a natural capstone to the course, not
only because it explains your performance and the quality of your final project, but because it
requires the rhetorical techniques that you have honed during your portfolio’s composition: You
will have to narrate, you will have to analyze and evaluate, and you will have to respond to and
synthesize texts.
Reflective Introduction Guidelines
A. The completed Reflective Introduction should be submitted with the course portfolio as an
overview of the collection of essays and your development this semester. It can either be
submitted as a standalone document through Canvas OR attached to your Digication Portfolio if
in the reflection section should you wish to represent yourself there more fully.
B. The Reflective Introduction should provide evidence of your acquisition of “content
knowledge” during the semester. It should demonstrate your grasp of rhetorical knowledge,
critical thinking/reading/writing skills, and the writing process. In other words, it should
represent a clear understanding of the basis for the essays, in-class discussions, journals, and
other works you’ve covered this semester.
C. The Reflective Introduction should provide evidence of your acquisition of “metacognitive
knowledge” during the semester. It should demonstrate your critical engagement with your own
writing process and your appreciation of how rhetorical theory applies to your own writing. In
other words, it should demonstrate your ability to look at your own writing, to assess your
strengths and weaknesses as a writer, and to use the framework of the course to argue stance.
D. The Reflective Introduction should provide evidence of your facility with the level of written
communication expected of college students. It should demonstrate your ability to make wise
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choices about how to frame your work for the intended audience. The Reflective Introduction
should do the following:
1. have a title and introduction that foster the reader’s interest
2. present a clear thesis that in some sense conveys an evaluation of your work and
development
3. develop your thesis through logical organization and connect its various subpoints with
effective transitions
4. provide sufficient evidence from a variety of sources (assigned readings, drafts,
finished essays, peer and instructor commentary, submission notes, etc.) in support of
claims
5. appropriately attribute and cite sources
6. be free of grammatical, mechanical, and usage errors.
PLEASE WRITE A REFLECTION ON HOW IVE GROWN DURING THIS SEMESTER IN ENGLISH 101 AND PLEASE INCLUDE THE ARGUMENT ELEMENTS; PREMISE, OPPOSITION, STANCE, EVIDENCE, EXPANSION AND PROPOSAL. PLEASE ALSO CHOOSE A CREATIVE TITLE FOR THE PAPER.