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Reflective Writing Project

Your final portfolio for English 101/118 will include revised and edited versions of the interpretive essays (2 out of the 3) you have been working on all semester. It will also include a final reflective project that attempts to account for the choices you have made in your writing given your rhetorical situation.

Over the course of this semester, you have produced and interpreted writing that presents a diverse array of composing strategies—poetry, comics, journalism, personal essays, academic essays, and so on. For this final piece, you should create a coherent text that considers your own composing and design strategies in the interpretive essays you included in your final portfolio.

Your final reflective project should include written text, but you can also feel free to incorporate other writing strategies and approaches as appropriate to your rhetorical situation. Consider the work you have produced in the interpretive essays as you make this decision. What kinds of writing strategies or mediums would help you to best reflect on the interpretive work you did this semester? What other mediums, outside of printing off words on a 8.5 x 11 inch paper, may you bring to this project? For example, you may want to consider creating your own comic, website, photo essay, or video. You could also integrate different media—like an interview-style or an opinion piece—into the how you decide to frame this writing.

You have many choices about how to compose your reflective essay and may integrate materials from other mediums with the written component. Keep in mind though, your final reflection should be a single, coherent project in the end.

THE TASK:

Re-read the “Course Description and Addendum” again. You read this piece for assignment #1. Now read it again with the perspective of having completed this semester. What do you notice now that you didn’t the first time you read it? What new meaning does it have for you now? How was your writing affected by the curriculum of this class?

As a whole, this final reflective project should address the following in some way:

Significant writing choices you made in composing your interpretive essays and why you made them given your rhetorical situation. Be specific. Which choices were influenced by your purpose, audience, or context?

How you arrived at those choices through a process of successive revisions over the course of the semester. What changed between your initial draft and your final draft? Why? In response to which concerns? How does the new draft fit your rhetorical situation more successfully?

The ways your writing has been influenced by your writing community. How has the collaborative process of workshopping your own writing and the writing of others influenced your understanding of the social nature of writing?

Specific ways that your writing works to respond to others ethically. How do you envision “what matters” to others in the interpretations you made? Who do you think you are addressing in your interpretation? How did you need to shape your interpretive writing in order to make ethical writing choices for these audiences?

Be sure to use specific, concrete examples from your own interpretive writing to help you engage with these questions.