Lee Torda

First Semester Freshman Composition Portfolio

Portfolios work in different ways in different classes. Sometimes they are used to simply collect the work that a student has done over a period of time. Sometimes they are used to mark progress via revision. And sometimes they are used as a way to assess student work—not simply his writing work but his effort and progress in class.

The portfolios you will turn in will do a little bit of all three of those things.  This is a chance for you to collect and reflect on your work, to think about what you’ve done well and what you still need to learn. I’ll ask you to write about this in a reflection letter that you include with the portfolios. Another way you will showcase your progress is through revision. You will revise some of your formal writing from each half of the semester. You’ll write about this in your reflection letter as well. 

Finally, I will use the portfolios as a way of assessing your effort, progress as a writer and as a student, and the quality of your written work. I will assess the portfolios and include a lengthy letter to you when I return them. That letter will detail your entire career in this class up to that point. It will give you feedback on the quality of the portfolio itself, and I will give you a letter grade that marks your progress in a way that is valued by the college.

NOTE:  I can give you two pieces of advice about how to approach portfolios: 1) I take the cover letter seriously. If you don’t, I will know. You can’t scam a scammer. It only frustrates me to have you waste my time with fluff that you don’t mean and that doesn’t help me to read your portfolio. So take the cover letter/analysis seriously. Be honest and useful in it. 2) I look for revision. If you have attempted good revisions, then you will be rewarded for it. If you say you’ve attempted revision but haven’t, you’ll be penalized for it. I don’t know how I can be anymore straightforward about what I will look for in the portfolios (revision and a good cover letter).

Your midterm portfolio is a first shot at revision. It is a chance to show what you’ve learned in the short time from the beginning of the semester to midterm. This portfolio is worth 15% of your final grade.

Here is what needs to go into your portfolio:

You will have the entire class period to complete the cover letter and turn the portfolio cover letter in.  See the syllabus for due dates.

Your final portfolio is your last opportunity to demonstrate to me what you’ve learned this semester. It is an important document. Here is the place to worry about the details and editing and typos. It should be the most polished writing I see from you. This portfolio is worth 15% of your final grade.

Here is what needs to go into your portfolio:

Final Portfolios are due to me at the end of class on the last day of classes. No exceptions or excuses. You’ll have the entire class period, just like at midterm, to complete the cover letter. I’ll give you a manila envelope in class. You will get your portfolios back during the scheduled exam period for this class.  For dates and times consult the syllabus link.

This course is meant to be an introduction to why we write. Mainly, it is my job to show you how to write for the college classroom. The way you write for your college teachers is different in some ways than any way you’ve been asked to write before. There are, as with most things, rules to be followed. I will try to help you understand not only what those rules are but the more important reasons for why we follow them.

But writing to get a good grade is something of a waste of my time and yours since you’ll only be writing for a grade for a relatively short time from this point on. So it is important that we look at other reasons to write—and read. Some of you might read and write for pleasure, I know it might be a stretch, but you might. This is good. Reading and writing can, I really believe, make us better, more thoughtful people. This is because reading and writing are both ways of making sense of the world around us. They are processes that require us to use our brains. And in that way what we do this semester is like running short training runs for a longer race—the critical work that I will ask you to try to do as we read and write this semester is practice for the critical thinking and writing you will need to do in real life. This is the more vital thing I will try to teach you this semester.

And so we will read and write together in order to develop your skills in both areas.  You will be responsible for reading and writing all kinds of texts, both informal and formal. You will do this work individually and as part of groups of varying size.

There are all sorts of ways we might do this, but I have tried to come up with a way that will best do this in the relatively short time we have together. I think one of the most productive ways to give you writing practice that doesn’t bore you to death is through a study of creative nonfiction. Creative nonfiction is writing that examines any and all aspects of the things (important and trivial) that give meaning to our lives. Nonfiction is also not about knowing something for sure. The word "essay" comes from the French "essayer," which means "to try."  Writers are always only trying to figure out what things mean. They are never sure. Critical reading and writing and thinking are all about a process of discovering what we think about something and, in addition, why we think what we think. That’s what an essay is: a written record of a writer’s search to figure something out. And the essay is what you write in college.

By the end of this class you should be able to demonstrate in your writing your developing understanding:

About the laptops: I will ask you to write everyday. And I would prefer that you send me that writing via email. There are certain days when you have to bring your laptops, but, honestly, it would be easiest if you brought them everyday.

                        All of these books are available from the bookstore.

Attendance.  What happens day-to-day in this class only works if we are all here as much as possible; therefore, attendance is mandatory.  Here is my policy on how absence will affect your evaluation in this class.

Furthermore, keep in mind:

Readings and informal writing. Students should come prepared to talk and write about whatever reading is due that day. Anything identified with a "READ" on the syllabus is due on that date.  We will write informally almost everyday about these readings. All of this writing will serve as evidence that you are doing the reading.

While in class, I will read short essays. I’ll ask you to respond to or write in the spirit of these essays. This will make up the bulk of your informal writing for the class. It could serve as an informal starting place for your more formal essays. I will collect and read them but with minimal and usually complimentary and enthusiastic feedback. Keeping up with readings and informal writings will count for 10% of your final grade.

Book club. A little known truth about college is that you have to read differently in college than you do, say, the newspaper or a romance novel. And some of you don’t read much at all, which is an even bigger problem. People also don’t realize that you can practice reading in order to become a better reader—it works like writing that way. With all this in mind, you will practice reading for college as part of a book club. You’ll read the book on your own, write an in-class journal about the book, and talk with your classmates about the book and your journal in class.  Book Clubs will meet about every two weeks. At the end of the semester, you’ll also do a brief presentation on a selected topic connected to your book that I will assign.

You will be evaluated on your attendance and effort during the book club meetings, the quality of your in-class journals, and your small group presentations. At the end of the club, you will collect all of your responses and write an introductory letter that talks about the experience. Then we’ll go on Oprah Winfrey—no, no, just kidding. On or about the first day of class I’ll ask you to pick what book you want (I use the term loosely) from a list of descriptions (of the titles I list under "texts" above).

Details for the bookclub are available online under the "assignments" link for this class.  Successful completion of the book club assignment will count towards 20% of your final grade.

Formal writing: in addition to the informal writing you will do, you will also complete four other formal writing projects. These writing assignments are briefly identified here. More complete explanations can be found under the "assignments" link for this class on my website. For more specific information about timelines and due dates see the "syllabus" link for this course.

Each of the formal assignments is worth 10% of your grade for a total of 40%.  To earn all 10% per draft you need to participate in the in-class workshop with a draft, turn in a revised draft along with your workshop draft on the due date, and not turn in thoughtless garbage.

Portfolios. The best way I have found to help students understand and appreciate what it means when I say "writing is a process" is to include a portfolio component in all of my writing classes. Twice this semester, once at midterm and once at the end of the semester, you will be responsible for collecting and revising the work you’ve done in class. You will turn in both formal and informal writing, some of it revised, some of it not.  You will also include an introductory essay that discusses what you’ve learned and provides a self-evaluation of your writing. These portfolios will be returned with formal letter grades attached that evaluate the work in the portfolio as well as your success in the class.

Details about your portfolio and the introductory letter is available online under the "portfolios" link for this class. Successful completion of the portfolios will count towards 30% of your grade.

Conferences.  You will meet with me twice this semester (unless you want to meet with me more). We will schedule these conferences in class during the semester. Once at midterm and once at the end of the semester, we will meet to talk about the progress of your portfolio revisions. The meetings will be about twenty minutes long. I will tell you very specifically what you should bring to the meeting at the time we schedule it. Failure to come to these conferences and/or failure to come to these conferences prepared with a draft to work on will count as an absence—it will also engender my ill will towards you for frittering around with my time, buster. 

In addition to these scheduled conferences, you are more than welcome to come see me during my office hours or during an arranged meeting to talk about your work.

You will not receive letter grades on individual drafts and assignments in this class. This will make some of your nuts, I know, but it really is for the best. It allows me the chance to give you credit for the things that grading individual papers will not let you do: this system, a portfolio system, allows me to count effort and revision and improvement. Even though you will not be getting letter grades on everything you turn in, you will receive extensive comments on your writing that should both give you a sense of the quality of your work as well as a way to begin to revise and improve your writing. At midterm and the end of the semester you will receive a final grade. These two letter grades will be based on the following criteria:

From my comments you should have a clear understanding of your progress in this class; if there is ever a time where you are not sure, come see me.

Breakdown of assessment percentages. Different assignments require different amounts of effort. The percentages that accompany each of the requirements in this class should give you an indication of the time and energy that each should take up in your student life.

Plagiarism. Plagiarism is taking other peoples words and ideas and claiming them for your own without giving the people who did the writing and the thinking the credit they have earned. Plagiarism is cheap thievery, and I will not stand for it. Don’t do it. I’ll know. You’ll fail the paper for sure, you’ll be sent before the disciplinary board of the college, and you could well fail the class. I do not think very highly of dishonest, cheating, unethical behavior—I don’t know who would, but I certainly don’t.

Students with learning disabilities. Students who need special accommodations due to a documented learning disability must come to see me with written documentation of the specific disability and suggested accommodations before the end of the drop add period. We can discuss specific accommodations at that time.

The Writing Studio. Located  in the Academic Achievement Center, on the bottom floor of the Library, the Writing Studio is available to any and all students at whatever level of expertise you might be at. They are a marvelous resource for this class. You can talk to them at any stage of your writing—from brainstorming, to drafting, to editing. If you are interested in getting useful and thorough feedback, the Writing Studio is a good place to go. The work they do will reinforce everything we are doing in this class. In addition, a great number of students who work there have been students in my classes. Finally, I will look kindly on any student who makes good use of this service.

I know this seems like a lot, but it will be a great class. Stick with it.

We will have been talking in class about all the things that make an essay an essay:  it is trying to answer a question, it strikes an intimate tone, it is both public writing at the same time that it is a kind of private writing. What marks a profile is that it does all this while trying to say something about another person who is important to your life.

Ultimately, what this profile should do is attempt to figure out something that you don’t understand but want to about a person that has proven significant to you in your life for whatever reason—good or bad. This might be a person you actually know; it might not be. The important thing is that you do justice in telling that person’s story in relation to you and your questions about them. And that is the hard part.

One way to go about figuring out who you should write about is to start with a list of anyone you could possibly write about. Absolutely anyone from Robert DeNiro to your version of my Aunt Lee to your dead grandmother to the woman who cleans the trash out of your office building. Then see what questions you have about these people.  Questions like "Why has he let himself play the same role over and over again?" and "Was she happy and did she think she should have been?" and, finally, "What makes her keep this building so clean you could eat off the bathroom floor?"  All of these are good questions. And each one might make a pretty good essay about the various people.

You have to start with a good question; then you have to try to write an honest answer.  The test is this: if you know the answer to the question already it isn’t worth asking in the first place. And whatever you write will not make for a good essay. There will be no surprise, no "ah-ha" moment. You will not enjoy writing it—and no one, including me, will enjoy reading it.

Returning to my idea about writing an essay about, of all things, my actually dead grandmother, you have to think that you could write a lot of boring stuff about how sweet she was and how much thinking about her brings back the bittersweet memories of childhood innocence and blah-blah and more blah about all of that. There’s no question there. There’s no nothing there. It’s just a bunch of hokey clichés (more on that in a minute) that got you an A for in fifth grade religion class. But there are certainly reasons and ways to write about dead grandmothers, even sweet ones (not sweet ways, sweet grandmothers).

I think that a good question I might ask about my grandmother is "was this woman really as at peace with her illness as she seemed to be, and what can I learn from the answer to that question?"  I think this is a good question. I really don’t know the answer, but to try to answer it, consider all the things I’d have to think about:

Above all, it will be, as I have said, the information that makes this piece interesting. The stories that illustrate all this searching. The life I breathe into the characters that will make them present in the piece. The searching I will do. If I knew the answers to my question already it would all seem dry and flat.

The bane of my teaching life are stupid cliché essays. It is so easy to write stupid, ugly crapola that sounds like it came from a Lifetime movie of the week. Here’s that version of the above essay:

It is harder to write essays that are complex and unique and not the essay anyone else could write. But it is so much better for everyone involved.

How Writing about Things is like other kinds of creative nonfiction: It is a searching piece of writing. It is writing to know. It is the writer asking a question and writing her way to an answer. In fact, perhaps more than any other sort of writing we have looked at, writing about things, or the personal essay, is exploratory writing. It is not about the finality of knowing for sure; it is about the uncertainty of trying to find out. Furthermore, it is writing from, as the phrase personal essay would suggest, your unique and idiosyncratic experience of the world. It is about you and your areas of interest and expertise. Your life experience will help you flesh out your argument. It is where your answer—and your question—will come from.

How Writing about Things is different than other kinds of creative nonfiction: Of late, the personal essay has been more about the personal and less about the essay. But the essay itself is a very old art form. The 18^th Century French intellectual and critic Montaigne is frequently credited with having made the genre what we know it today, but there are versions of the essay in both a western and a nonwestern tradition. The tradition of the personal essay is a critical one—review writing in its best form is a kind of personal essay. Meditations on war and peace and culture and style, on quirky trends and larger, timeless concerns that define our shared humanity—all of this is the stuff of the traditional essay. It is an essay of philosophy. It is rigorous, but musing. As you will see from the readings we are doing for this part of class, the personal essay takes on issues and ideas that we are all aware of (or should be aware of), but looks at them from a personal perspective.

Public and Private: I have this paper be the last we write together because it is a good bridge from the more personal kind of writing that we’ve been doing all semester long into the more academic writing that you will need to do for most of your other classes in college. It is both personal—in that these are your ideas and your experiences and your interests. But it is also public—it’s about ideas that everyone could have an opinion about: some movie, some baseball game, some form of dance, some kind of hairstyle. Balancing the public and the private is a big part of this assignment.

Research: though it was never not allowed, research has not been a component of our writing this semester. This essay requires some. We will take some time to use the library to do this work. Too often when people find out that they have to do research they panic. Sometimes people think this means that having to include research means they can cheat. Well, really, the reason scholars quote is because they are demonstrating how they are a part of a community of other smart people who have other ideas about the same topic. Quoting and citation (how we put research in a paper) is how they show that they know who these other smart people are and what they are saying and how it is or is not related to what they are saying.   Think of it this way. If you were eating dinner with your friends and you were all arguing about something you have an opinion about—a TV show, a call by a coach in a game, a new style in clothes—you’d all sit around and sort of listen to each other and shout at each other and interrupt and all of that. But you can’t do that in a research paper because, well, all the people you need to talk to aren’t actually in the room with you. So that’s why you quote. To bring these other smart people and their ideas into your paper just as if you were all sitting around a dinner table talking about your ideas.

Finally: The worst thing that happens when students write personal essays such as these is that they over do it by thinking they’ve got to pick some big topic like gun control. The key to successfully writing this essay is not about picking some big and emotional issue. It’s about dealing with whatever issue you choose (the consummate value of a movie like E.T. or Dirty Dancing or Pretty in Pink, the glory of a good cup of coffee, the art of ironing your father’s shirt) with honesty and intelligence and wit.  This is perhaps the most creative essay you will write this semester. It is also the trickiest.  Write well. 

ASSIGNMENTS      ENGL101 WRITING I
Book Club
This project will give you practice in reading traditional texts; it should help you become a better reader.  Too often we think that if we don’t get something we read, it wasn’t meant to be got.  Meaning will not just jump out of the book and present itself to you.  You must work at it.  You must look at the information that the book gives you and decide on a theory of what the book is trying to say.  Then you need to figure out the way the facts in the book support your theory.  This is what you do when you read.  You may not think reading is something you should have to work that hard at, but it can be—certainly in a classroom setting at least—and I hope the book club project will help you to see this, as well as give you strategies to help you be a better reader for this and all of your classes. 

I also hope you will get out of this what the "club" part of the project means: meaning just doesn’t fall out of the sky and into your own head.  You think a thought; you share it with a friend; they add to it; it comes back to you a different, more complicated, maybe better (or maybe worse) thought then when it was with you alone. Whatever happens, though, it is a different thought then when it started.  That’s the nature of how we make sense of things.  This book will be no different.  Your group will help you figure out what is important in this book and you will help them.  Writing and reading are collaborative enterprises. 

Book Club will be held once every two weeks or so in class for about a half hour to fifty minutes. You’ll meet with a group of about five other people Your group will decide the book you choose. Here are your book club choices for this semester.

 1. Read the book. As a group you should decide how to divide up the reading over the course of the semester. Use the syllabus to help you set page amounts for each meeting. I would suggest counting up how many book club meetings there are and divide the number of pages in the book by that number.

2. Write the journal.  At the start of each book club, you will write for around ten minutes about whatever you read for that meeting. You should always be developing your theory of what is important/significant about the book—always trying to figure out what the book is trying to say.  So you just can’t summarize.  You have to think and write about why this story is being told as well as how it is being told. You should expect to share these journals with your book club.

4. Write a final reflection.  After you’ve finished the book, also during book club, you’ll write a reflection on your reading over the course of the semester.  You will write on this prompt: describe the reading process based on your work on the book club project.  What role does writing about your reading play in making meaning?  These might seem like impossible questions right now, but by the end of the semester, you’ll have smart things to say. 

In addition to the reading and writing you will do for the book, you will also do a group presentation about the book. More information will follow at the end of the semester about this presentation.

Much like the profile, essays of place attempt to understand one thing through the description of another—namely, essays of place offer writers an opportunity to understand how a particular place and time has shaped them, affected them, moved them, given them something to say. Your goal, in this essay, is to identify such a place in your life.  Of course, how do you get there?  Well, it is always useful in the essay to figure out what your question is:  what are you trying to understand by exploring this place and your connection to it? 

This is a place to start. Where do you go from there? The Essay of Place also has some components to it that, once understood, can help you construct your text.

I call Essays of Place "ethnographic" for a reason. Ethnography is the work of the anthropologist. Traditionally, ethnographers would go to a culture—often times a third world culture—and spend many, many years observing that culture, studying its ways, identifying patterns in behavior. They studied everything:  language, rituals, artifacts, relationships. The hallmark of this writing is something that Clifford Geertz, an ethnographer himself, called "thick description"—a particularly visual way to describe the layers of observation that went in to the work of the ethnographer. Of interest now is the idea of auto-ethnography. Auto-ethnography is where anthropologists or interested writers explore the complexity of belonging to the particular cultures that they find themselves a part of.  The idea is that you can discover a tremendous amount about the significance of a place in your life and, potentially, in the lives of others, by paying careful attention to the world around you. Thus, thinking of your essay of place as an ethnographic project (at least in part) can be helpful. Essays of place have several very ethnographic characteristics:

The layers of observation in ethnography make the important things about a culture apparent to readers. In an essay, though, the writer is more conscientiously reflective. Metaphor is the effort of a writer to make us understand one thing by explaining it in terms of something else. Trying to use people, artifacts, scents, smells, scenes, and images in your essay to help you explain what it is you really mean is not only useful, it is, in fact, what an essay is supposed to do.

            It is the balance between the ethnographic and the metaphorical that will make for good essays of place.

Much like the profile, essays of place attempt to understand one thing through the description of another—namely, essays of place offer writers an opportunity to understand how a particular place and time has shaped them, affected them, moved them, given them something to say. Your goal, in this essay, is to identify such a place in your life.  Of course, how do you get there?  Well, it is always useful in the essay to figure out what your question is:  what are you trying to understand by exploring this place and your connection to it? 

This is a place to start. Where do you go from there? The Essay of Place also has some components to it that, once understood, can help you construct your text.

I call Essays of Place "ethnographic" for a reason. Ethnography is the work of the anthropologist. Traditionally, ethnographers would go to a culture—often times a third world culture—and spend many, many years observing that culture, studying its ways, identifying patterns in behavior. They studied everything:  language, rituals, artifacts, relationships. The hallmark of this writing is something that Clifford Geertz, an ethnographer himself, called "thick description"—a particularly visual way to describe the layers of observation that went in to the work of the ethnographer. Of interest now is the idea of auto-ethnography. Auto-ethnography is where anthropologists or interested writers explore the complexity of belonging to the particular cultures that they find themselves a part of.  The idea is that you can discover a tremendous amount about the significance of a place in your life and, potentially, in the lives of others, by paying careful attention to the world around you. Thus, thinking of your essay of place as an ethnographic project (at least in part) can be helpful. Essays of place have several very ethnographic characteristics:

The layers of observation in ethnography make the important things about a culture apparent to readers. In an essay, though, the writer is more conscientiously reflective. Metaphor is the effort of a writer to make us understand one thing by explaining it in terms of something else. Trying to use people, artifacts, scents, smells, scenes, and images in your essay to help you explain what it is you really mean is not only useful, it is, in fact, what an essay is supposed to do.

            It is the balance between the ethnographic and the metaphorical that will make for good essays of place.

Much like the profile, essays of place attempt to understand one thing through the description of another—namely, essays of place offer writers an opportunity to understand how a particular place and time has shaped them, affected them, moved them, given them something to say. Your goal, in this essay, is to identify such a place in your life.  Of course, how do you get there?  Well, it is always useful in the essay to figure out what your question is:  what are you trying to understand by exploring this place and your connection to it? 

This is a place to start. Where do you go from there? The Essay of Place also has some components to it that, once understood, can help you construct your text.

I call Essays of Place "ethnographic" for a reason. Ethnography is the work of the anthropologist. Traditionally, ethnographers would go to a culture—often times a third world culture—and spend many, many years observing that culture, studying its ways, identifying patterns in behavior. They studied everything:  language, rituals, artifacts, relationships. The hallmark of this writing is something that Clifford Geertz, an ethnographer himself, called "thick description"—a particularly visual way to describe the layers of observation that went in to the work of the ethnographer. Of interest now is the idea of auto-ethnography. Auto-ethnography is where anthropologists or interested writers explore the complexity of belonging to the particular cultures that they find themselves a part of.  The idea is that you can discover a tremendous amount about the significance of a place in your life and, potentially, in the lives of others, by paying careful attention to the world around you. Thus, thinking of your essay of place as an ethnographic project (at least in part) can be helpful. Essays of place have several very ethnographic characteristics:

The layers of observation in ethnography make the important things about a culture apparent to readers. In an essay, though, the writer is more conscientiously reflective. Metaphor is the effort of a writer to make us understand one thing by explaining it in terms of something else. Trying to use people, artifacts, scents, smells, scenes, and images in your essay to help you explain what it is you really mean is not only useful, it is, in fact, what an essay is supposed to do.

            It is the balance between the ethnographic and the metaphorical that will make for good essays of place.

T  Introductions to each other. One page, typed, double-spaced, clever, charming, funny introduction of classmate due by class time. READ: book club information available online.

TH  READ: 11-17 in I & Eye. Also, read information online about profile essay (writing about people).

T READ: 43-47 in I & Eye. Grammar Survey part one.

TH READ:  59-67 in I & Eye.   DUE:  Draft of profile for workshopping. Discussion of workshops. Discussion of evaluation narratives.  Grammar Survey part two.

T DUE:  Draft of profile to turn in to me. BRING HANDBOOK TO CLASS. Discussion of Grammar Survey. Talking about how to fix your own writing.

TH READ: information online about place essay (writing about places).