Eng 309 Unit 4 Final Portfolio Assignment Sheet

1. ENGL 309
Final Reflective Memo and Revision
Educator and philosopher John Dewey argued, “We don’t learn from
experience – we learn from reflecting on our experience.” In other words,
it’s only in the concerted effort to recollect and make sense of what you’ve
done that genuine knowledge is created.
To that end, the last project we’ll be completing in English 309 this semester
will be a final portfolio that reflects on what you’ve done this semester and
gives you an opportunity to revise major projects of the semester.
Specifically, your portfolio will consist of these deliverables:
1. A reflective memo (described in detail below). The memo will be a
blending of definition, reflection, and a collection of evidence.
2. Depending on what grade you’re going for (please revisit the Grading
Contract), substantive revisions of up to all three of your major
projects: the Genre Challenges project, the Stylistic Analysis and
Imitative Essay, and Writing 2020.
1. Reflective Memo
While, as always, I hesitate to give a strict word count, the reflective memo
should be a substantial document - it will likely be somewhere between
1000-1500 words. It should be formatted properly, with sub-headed sections
and single-spaced block paragraph format, as we’ve done for almost all of

2. our assignments this semester. (Look back at some of the templates I’ve
posted if you want to remind yourself about what good memo format is.)
The reflective memo will consist of two separate sections, plus an
introduction and conclusion, described below.
Introduction of Reflective Memo
As always, the introduction should succinctly state the purpose of the memo
and include an overview of what the memo contains.
Section 1 of Reflective Memo: How You Met the Course Learning
Outcomes
The basis for Section 1 of the reflective memo will be the course learning
outcomes, which are spelled out in the syllabus:
Course Outcomes
By the time you leave this course, you should...
● Be able to explain why style is not just expressive, but also rhetorical, deeply
intertwined with genre, purpose, and audience.
● Have developed a deeper, more robust understanding of how and why writers
make stylistic choices, as well as the effects of those choices.
● Be able to analyze the features of genres, and skillfully reproduce and
manipulate them.
● Recognize the rhetorical dimensions (“motives,” convention/deviation,
distinction, tropes, schemes, and images) of another writer’s style and be able
to replicate it effectively.
● Effectively give feedback on other’s writing and use others’ feedback to
improve your own writing.
For this section, I expect you to address how well you feel that you met each
of these learning outcomes, using evidence from your work this semester to
show that you did or did not. Here are some suggestions for how you might
do that:
● For outcome 1 (“Be able to explain why style is not just expressive,
but also rhetorical, deeply intertwined with genre, purpose, and
audience.”), explain or define style as we have talked about it this

3. semester, making sure to include information about audience,
purpose, and genre. I expect you to use Performing Prose and the
other sources we read in class to support your ideas.
● For outcome 2 (“Have developed a deeper, more robust understanding
of how and why writers make stylistic choices, as well as the effects of
those choices.”), you’ll probably discuss the analytical work you did
this semester - i.e., the genre analysis for Project 1 and the Stylistic
Analysis for Project 2 - as well as your own work in those projects, like
the genre reproduction and imitative essay.
● For outcome 3 (“Be able to analyze the features of genres, and
skillfully reproduce and manipulate them.”), you might talk about your
work both on Project 1 and Project 3.
● For outcome 4 (“Recognize the rhetorical dimensions [“motives,”
convention/deviation, distinction, tropes, schemes, and images] of
another writer’s style and be able to replicate it effectively.”), discuss
your process of writing the imitative essay.
● For outcome 5 (“Effectively give feedback on other’s writing, and use
others’ feedback to improve your own writing.”) discuss your
experience of doing peer reviews of others’ work - what did you feel
like was the most helpful feedback you gave to others, and what kind
of feedback did you find most helpful? This is a good place to make
suggestions, too, if you think certain approaches would be better than
others).
Section 2 of Reflective Memo: Explanation of Project Revisions
This section should provide a detailed description and explanation of how
you revised each of the major projects that you’ve included in the portfolio.
For each description and explanation, you should summarize the feedback I
gave you on the projects, along with your own thoughts about what needed
to be done to make the projects better. Then you should explain - again, in
detail - what you DID end up doing (in other words, you should wait to write
this section until after you’ve finished revising.
Just to be clear: I will be looking for substantial revisions. Remember that
if you’re going for an A in the class, as per the Grading Contract, you need
to do substantive or transformative revisions of all three major projects. If I
see that all you’ve done is changed a sentence or two or otherwise did

4. superficial work, I won’t count this as a significant revision, and you won’t
get credit for including it in your final portfolio.
In a few instances, students put in a lot of work up front for the projects,
and I may have told you that you didn’t have much revision to do. In your
explanation of the projects, you can explain that you didn’t do much revision
because I told you that you didn’t have to.
Conclusion of Reflective Memo
The conclusion of your reflective memo is a good place to provide both
summative and looking-ahead comments. For instance, you might say your
biggest takeaway from the class, as well as what you struggled most with
and hope to keep working on in the future.
1I. Revised Versions of Projects.
You can upload each of these separately to BbLearn - make sure they are
clearly labelled, e.g. “[Your Last Name]_REVISED-Project 1.”