Humanities Homework Help

1. Reflective Introduction: Your portfolio introduction should have a thesis or controlling claim and should analyze and synthesize the elements of your portfolio (these are concepts you should be familiar with, should be able to distinguish, and should have experience completing after this semester). Much of your portfolio grade will be based on this essay; it is your foundation.

Essentially, you will be presenting a clear, concise (around 500-750 word essay or 5 minute audio or video project), thesis-driven project that makes a central claim about your writing, revising, and editing with regards to this class. All of the material you include in your portfolio will provide the evidence/supporting details and quotes you will need to fully develop your essay. As always, providing specific evidence to support clear topics makes a strong essay.
Here are some questions you could ask yourself / tactics you could use: [all of this complete section is written by Dr. Parrot…but note that anything in purple are my notes and advice. I would strongly urge you to follow these points in writing your reflection. I have found that these kinds of reflections are easiest done as a letter. Please feel free to write a letter to me! (:]

• Compose a letter, podcast, or vodcast directed to somebody explaining your writing and the work you’ve done in this class. What would you want that person to see in your work?
• Reflect on your strengths and weaknesses as a writer in any part of the writing and composing processes as described in the rubric. Show through revision your understanding of how to improve those weaknesses and emphasize the strengths.
• Comment on the most interesting, most difficult, or most surprising things you learned about yourself as a writer, student, or person through writing this semester.
• Describe how the different skills used in reading, researching, drafting, editing, composing, organizing, analyzing, documenting, proofreading, and writing in this course, as demonstrated through your work, contribute to your ability to perform well in other courses or activities (think about such skills as developing critical reading skills; knowing how to support claims with specific evidence; recognizing ethos, pathos, and logos; audience awareness; or use of grammar and sentence structure).
• Answer the question “Who is the ‘me’ that I want to present in my portfolio? And, how do my exhibits provide evidence for that?”

Approaches you should avoid:

• Writing one paragraph about each item in your portfolio.
• Making lots of good / bad evaluative claims about your writing with very few or no supporting examples.
• Telling a story about English 102. (“I was a really bad writer until I got into
  English 102and then, with the help of my instructor and my peers, I learned a lot.” or “Our first essay was about X, and I learned Y. . . Our second essay was about A, and I learned B. . .”)

All these approaches make it difficult to sustain a thesis and to provide adequate support.
2. Polished Project Exhibit — Your revised research paper. This best represents your skills developed thissemester. Create a one-paragraph introduction for the exhibit that explains what you learned about writing and/or critical reading from this project. [Please note that all of these paragraphs should run around 5 sentences and can be writtein in a conversational tone, which means passive verbs. This does not mean using vague words like it and thing which confuse the reader. This applies to all the intros for each of the sections. Note that these paragraphs deal specifcally with what you have learned or in the case of the wild card, what you loved about that writing.]
3. Process Exhibit — Your revised listening essay. Please turn in three drafts: first draft to me, draft submitted forpeer review, and final paper. Create a one-paragraph introduction for this section that explains what important improvements the reader should see in this progression.
4. Peer Review Exhibit — One of the learning goals for this course is that you can both create your own writing and discuss the writing of others intelligently. In the Peer Review Exhibit, choose one peer review interaction you have had with a peer where you are giving them advice about their writing. Show their work and your comments and provide a one-paragraph introduction that explains why you’ve chosen this as your example and in what ways you feel you contributed to their becoming a better writer.
5. Information Literacy Exhibit — Being able to find, evaluate, read, integrate, and synthesize information is an essential intellectual skill both inside and outside the classroom. In this exhibit, choose a text you used in your research project to highlight. You should cite it using the appropriate format (MLA, APA, etc.), provide a summary paragraph (3-5 sentences), and show an example of its integration in your project, and conclude with a paragraph describing how the synthesis of this text added to the project. [Note that this is the only section where you conclude with your reflection. Remember you are only sharing ONE source with one MLA format and one summary. Only one of the sources either from your listening paper or from your research paper. You are to then include the paragraph where you used that source. So, the citation, the article summary, the paragraph from your paper where you used the source, and your paragraph reflection.]
6. Wild Card —You can include anything here that you’ve authored: another piece of writing for this class, an essay from another class, a CPA/homework assignment that you thought expressed some strong critical or creative thinking, an electronic text of any kind (a blog post, for example), something from high school, an infographic explaining one of your essays, or something creative you’ve written for fun. Create a one-paragraph introduction for this section that explains why you have chosen this piece.