Purpose

A portfolio is a collection of selected documents used to showcase your skills with writing.
These may be used in class settings (like with this assignment), in professional settings to help
you get a job or show your work to a supervisor, and in academic pursuits such as when applying
for graduate school or a scholarship. Portfolios are meant to be shared with others, and as such
they must be carefully designed and crafted to best present your work and skills to a specific
target audience. An ePortfolio serves the same purpose, but it is an electronic version that allows
you to take advantage of the various technologies afforded by the chosen platform.

Planning For Your Portfolio

Making an Argument
Your Final ePortfolio is a reflection of both your work in the composition program and your
preparation to leave the program and move into future academic writing situations at the
university. As the final required general education composition course you will have to take
at UCF, think about this portfolio as your chance to prove to me that you have developed
the necessary writing skills to help you succeed in your major and/or career. As we've
talked about this semester, this is not just a dumping ground for all of your assignments. Instead,
you will have to make some careful decisions about what you will include on your website to
best represent your writing and success in this course. 
Before you begin creating your ePortfolio, you must decide on an argument you want your
ePortfolio to make:
Do you want to show progress (process) by emphasizing how much you have learned and grown
as a writer and researcher?

 This kind of portfolio is useful if you have seen your writing and research confidence
grow this semester, with you developing new skills and writing strategies across the
course. You would want to highlight where you started, where you ended up, and how
that progress can allow you to now move into your major or profession.
 For this argument, your portfolio would work to show how over time you grew to meet
the four ENC 1102 outcomes. 

Do you want to show success (skills) by emphasizing your strengths as a writer and researcher

that you know will be needed in your major or career?

 Unlike a progress argument, this kind of portfolio would highlight where you were
successful in the course and what specific writing and research skills you have
demonstrated (like formatting, making claims, synthesizing sources, etc.) and why those
skills will be needed in your major or profession. The emphasis is less on how you
developed those skills, and more on what those skills are and where you demonstrated
them.
 For this argument, your portfolio would work to show how across the semester you
demonstrated proficiency of all four ENC 1102 outcomes. 

Your Audience
For this portfolio, I am your target audience. While you can assume that I have a basic
knowledge of the main assignment prompts we've worked with, do not expect me to remember
everything you have personally written in the course. As part of this assignment, as you'll see
below, you will be choosing specific artifacts from class (homework submissions, notes, papers,
etc.) to show me the skills you've developed. You cannot assume that I will remember what you
wrote in that submission or why that is a strong artifact to showcase, so you must still do the
work of arguing and justifying why that piece is being included on your portfolio. You have
learned this semester how to make arguments and support arguments with evidence, and this is
another assignment that requires you to do that. If it helps, assume I remember nothing aside
from assignment prompts and definitions of main terms we've worked with.

Creating Your Portfolio

Home Page
Your ePortfolio should open with a "welcome" page that introduces the content of your
ePortfolio to your audience and reflects on your design choices. This is where your audience
should learn about the argument your portfolio is making and, if chosen to include one, the
metaphor your ePortfolio will showcase to present your chosen artifacts. 

Outcomes-Based Cover Letter

As part of this Home page, you must include your outcomes-based cover letter. Here you must
reflect on the course outcomes from ENC 1102Links to an external site. and discuss how and
where you have demonstrated each of the four course outcomes this semester. More information
will be provided on the content pages for this unit, but this reflection should be thorough and
serve as an introduction to the rest of your portfolio.

In your cover letter, create a compelling narration about how your research process demonstrates
the course outcomes. In order to support this narrative, use evidence from your selected artifacts
(explained below) to show how your work in the course demonstrated these four
outcomes. Quote or paraphrase from these assignments to connect your work to the course
outcomes.

An outstanding cover letter clearly indicates which items in the portfolio demonstrate the course
outcomes and discusses and reflects on phases of the research process. The cover letter displays
thorough and thoughtful awareness of your own writing and research process. You must
incorporate evidence and strategically quote, paraphrase, or summarize passages from your own
work (both strong and weak samples matter) in order to talk about your research process and
how it connects to the course outcomes.

In order to accomplish the above goals, your cover letter should do the following:

Make a claim about how your writing—as a whole—responds to the course outcomes (This is
not about making a grade claim, but about making a claim for writing development vis-à-vis the
course outcomes);

Identify, analyze, and argue for how your portfolio selections demonstrate key course outcomes.
This is successfully done through quoting and analyzing your own work in direct relation to the
outcomes;  

Use the language of the course outcomes and your own writing to support your portfolio’s
narrative and claim (Remember: You are not describing that you accomplished certain outcomes,
but you are arguing for how your work accomplishes the outcomes).

An especially effective way to discuss the research process in relation to the course outcomes is
to move chronologically through the course and talk about the stages of your research. But I am
NOT expecting a perfect narrative. I am expecting a thorough discussion of the research process,
what it means to you now, and how you see all of your work fitting in with that process. 

Researcher's Statement
Your ePortfolio will be showcasing your work in the course, so your audience will expect to
know who you are. To help introduce yourself, you must craft a "researcher's statement" that
clarifies who you are as a writer and researcher. Think of this as your "About Me" page where
visitors of your website learn about the owner and creator of this portfolio. They want to know
what writing and research looks like for you, so you might reflect on the everyday kinds of
writing and research you do and/or the academic and professional kinds of writing and research
you will have to do here at UCF and after graduation. 

Many students opt to include some kind of relevant and appropriate profile picture here, but it is
not required. 

Main Pages (Evidence of Argument)

To support your Outcomes-Based Cover Letter, you must select 5-10 artifacts from this semester
that support your main argument. These should be the artifacts you reflect on in that cover letter
to demonstrate how you met the course outcomes.

Of these artifacts, you must include each of your major papers: the Research Proposal, Annotated
Bibliography, and Final Research Paper.

If you shadow graded any of these assignments, that revised file should be used here (either in
replacement of the original draft, or as a separate file). 

For the remaining files, you could include reading responses, discussion board posts, replies to
peers on discussion boards, peer review feedback you provided to your partners, primary data
notes from your research process, ePortfolio reflections, reading notes, or any other
outlines/brainstorming files you've saved from the semester. 

You must organize those artifacts on specific pages that help you present your writing and reflect
on why each artifact is being included. Each page will need to include the relevant artifacts
associated with that page title, along with framing statements that provide context for each
artifact. These statements can act as introductions to the page placed above your documents, or
you can have individual statements next to each artifact, as long as you are justifying why the
artifacts shown on that page were included in your portfolio. These framing statements should be
carefully crafted to help support your argument and make it clear why you picked each and what
you want your readers to notice. 

Designing the Portfolio

The above outline clarifies what must be included on your website to meet the minimum
requirements for this assignment. When working on this website, you must also be mindful of
the design, organization, and overall effectiveness of this portfolio. When working, keep the
following in minds:

Your ePortfolio website must be structured and organized in a way that is intuitive and user-
friendly. This means that you have a clearly defined home page and subsequent pages that are
easy to locate and follow, with an easily located menu bar that has thoughtful page titles
(typically found at the top of the website).

You must think through color choices, templates, fonts, and any other multimodal elements you
include, such as images, videos, or audio clips. 

Your ePortfolio has a lot of parts to it, so it is important that your website has cohesion. The
design, organization, writing artifacts, reflective statements, and overall argument should all
support one another to make your website look like a clear, legible, and cohesive display of your
work in ENC 1102. 

The content used must be appropriate for an academic or professional community. This means
that you have taken the time to proofread and revise the language used across the website to be
professional and formal. 

All visuals and multimodal elements are appropriate for a professional or academic community
and this assignment, and must help support your argument.