Purpose & Audience

A portfolio is essentially a curated collection—that is, a purposeful collection of stuff that also includes some explanation of the stuff and why it matters: a kind of guided tour. In this case, you’re showcasing your efforts to develop a theory of writing — for yourself and for other/future LANG 120 students — that both accounts for your past experience and anticipates what’s ahead. The challenge here is how to trace a cohesive through-line, how to connect the dots of your various “artifacts,” in order to sketch an overall picture of your theory.

Suggested Contents & Structure

As always, keep your intended audience in mind as you plan and implement your design choices. To this end, be sure to prioritize accessibility, ease of navigation, and aesthetic appeal for your reader-visitors. What might bring them in and hold their attention?

With all of this in mind, the following list identifies several elements that may help you to create a cohesive overall presentation of your developing theory of writing. Nevertheless, feel free to adapt these suggestions and shape your website in ways that you think will best serve you and your audience:

  • Home/Landing/Welcome Page: Consider what you want your reader-visitors to see first; what (text, visuals, etc.) would help them understand what this site is about and how to navigate it?
  • Letter to First-Year Students: Introduce your portfolio with a letter to future LANG 120 students about what you’ve learned about writing (and about yourself as a writer), how your portfolio illustrates what you’ve learned (and/or points forward to what you intend to keep working on), and what you suggest future students do to make the most of the course. (See below for some questions that may help you in drafting this.) Your letter can thus serve not only to articulate your theory of writing, but also provide your readers with some guidance on how best to read the portfolio as a whole. With this in mind, then, I recommend locating it prominently so that readers can easily find it—and understand that they should read it first.
  • Project Artifacts & Introductory Notes: For each major project — the exploration and investigation projects — provide both artifact(s) and an introductory note.
    • Project Artifacts: What work do you want to showcase? These could include final submissions as well as any prep work, drafts, or other supporting items that highlight what you’ve worked on — and learned. You may also include work from other classes, particularly when you can point to moments of transfer or connection between what you’re learning across different classes.
    • Introductory Notes: Introduce each artifact with a brief explanation of (a) the task, its purpose, and your goals; (b) your choices and process (why you approached it the way you did); and (c) your takeaways — what you learned from working on the project and thus, in effect, why it was important to you to include it; how has it contributed to your emerging theory of writing? Position these notes so that your visitors read the note before they review the artifact(s).
  • Annotated Bibliography: Include a page that features at least three rhetorical summaries of the readings you completed for projects one and two, each headed by a bibliographic citation and arranged alphabetically by each lead author’s last name.
  • About Me: ePortfolios routinely include a page that briefly profiles the writer/creator of the site. For a sense of the options here, in terms of content, style, and structure, take a look at the samples included in this resource.

Additional/Optional Elements to Consider:

  • Resume (but protect your privacy and don’t include your address or phone number)
  • Artifacts from other courses (see notes above, under “project artifacts & process notes”)
  • Blog
  • Photos (yours, or others’, with appropriate Creative Commons licensing &/or credits)
  • Skills
  • Links

Reflection Questions to Help You Craft Your Introductory Letter:

To help you explore what you’ve learned and what you might recommend to future students about making the most of the course, consider questions like these:

  • How are you coming to understand your past writing experiences, the ways you’ve developed as a writer, and the challenges you expect to face in the days ahead?
  • How do your initial learning goals compare with what you’ve actually learned? What, if anything, surprises you?
  • Where do you see evidence of growth and development in your work or your thinking about your work? (And how might you point your readers to specific projects, included in your portfolio, that help to exemplify your development?)
  • Which concepts, readings, projects, or other activities have proven most helpful for you? Most challenging?
  • Given that projects may vary from semester to semester, what advice could you offer that would be helpful and relevant regardless of the particular tasks that future students may face?
  • What do you plan to keep working on beyond this course?

Other Resources:

In addition to asking the instructor, your peers, and the Media Design Lab for help, remember that you can peruse previous students’ portfolios for ideas or inspiration on this linked advice and models page.