Week 15 — Your Portfolio and the Letter That Proves It — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 14 of the term — test a reflection with the two-part test, curate your own portfolio, write the reflective cover letter that proves what you can now do, and explain one skill to someone outside the course.

This week you learned to treat reflection as metacognition written down, to test every reflection sentence for a named move and a named piece, to use your diagnostic as a baseline, to curate a portfolio with a rationale for each piece, to give the reflective cover letter its four jobs, and to name where a skill will travel. In Week 1 you wrote an ungraded diagnostic and learned that reflection is the fifth stage of the writing process; this week you use that diagnostic as your baseline and write the reflection the course has been building toward. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Writing Studio practise the same moves from other angles; this assignment is where you put them together, and it is the last assignment of the course.

The task

This week you prove what you can now do as a writer. You test someone else's reflection first, then curate your own portfolio and write the letter that introduces it.

Part A — test a reflection. Here is a paragraph from an illustrative classmate's draft cover letter, written for this course and attributed to no one. One sentence per line:

1. "This course taught me so much about writing."
2. "I worked harder on these essays than on anything I wrote before college."
3. "In my rhetorical analysis, I rewrote my third paragraph so that it explains how the repeated 'Now is the time' builds urgency instead of only labeling it pathos."
4. "I also got much better at grammar."
5. "In my narrative essay, I cut the sentence 'I was really nervous' and showed my hands shaking on the clipboard instead."
6. "Overall, I am proud of how much I have grown as a writer."

Say how many of its 6 sentences fail at least one part of the two-part test for reflection, given that 2 of them pass both parts, and show how you got that number. Then name the two sentences that pass and, for each one, the move it names and the piece it points to. Finally, rebuild two of the failing sentences as sentences about your own work. Each rebuilt sentence must name a move and point to a named piece of your writing from this course.

Part B — curate your portfolio and write the letter. A student's course folder holds 14 pieces of writing, and the portfolio keeps 3 chosen pieces plus the 1 diagnostic baseline; say how many pieces stay out of the portfolio and how you got that number. Then build your own portfolio from your work in this course:

• Choose. Pick three pieces of your own writing from the course and keep your Week 1 diagnostic as the baseline. For each chosen piece, write a one-sentence rationale that names the skill it proves. Name one piece you left out and say why it stays out.
• Choose the tool. Pick the clearest revision you made in any of your pieces. Name the course tool that found the problem (for example, a reverse outline, the PIE move, the four-part integration move, the two-pass rule, or the clause rule), explain why it was the right tool for that problem, and explain why one other tool would have missed it.
• Write the reflective cover letter, about one page. It must do the four jobs: say what you chose, why you chose it, what you learned, and how you revised. Inside it, quote your own words from your diagnostic and from a later piece to show one change, name your clearest revision move by move and call it revision only if it changed what the writing claims or proves, and close with a transfer: one skill you can name and the new place you will use it.

Explain it to someone outside the course

Pick a real reader outside this course who has a reason to care, such as a family member, a coach, or a future supervisor. Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains, in everyday words, one writing skill you can now use, where it shows in your work, and one honest limit of what that skill can do. Explain any course term your reader might not know.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine someone who finished a first-aid class explaining it to the organizer of a youth soccer league. Model answer: "I can now clean and cover a scrape the right way: in the class I practised rinsing out the dirt before the bandage, and I did it on a teammate at our last game. That means small injuries can be handled on the sideline without waiting for a parent. One limit: I am trained for minor injuries only, so anything serious still needs a call for help right away."

Use that pattern for your own reader, with your own skill and your own evidence.

Reflect on your revision

Before you submit, audit your first draft: beside every sentence of your cover letter, write the move it names and the piece it points to, and mark any sentence with neither; check that you quoted your own words from both the diagnostic and a later piece; sort each change you describe into revision or editing; check that your last sentence names a skill and a place; and revise. Then answer one of these two options in 2–4 sentences; they carry the same weight:

• (a) Which change to your cover letter did the most to turn a claim about your growth into evidence, and what can a reader now check?
• (b) How did choosing what to leave out of your portfolio change what your letter says about you?

Where this leads

This is the last assignment of the course. Next comes finals week, Week 16, with the final exam; its study guide, practice exam, and exam-prep tutorial are in the finals-week module. Naming a revision as revision rather than editing, and pointing to evidence instead of effort, is the same habit of telling a course distinction apart that the final asks of you on passages you have not seen.

Deliverables

Submit in the assignment entry: the Part A count and how you got it, the passing sentences, and your two rebuilt sentences; the Part B count and how you got it, your chosen pieces with their rationales, the piece you left out and why, your tool choice, and your reflective cover letter; your message to your reader; and your reflection. Attach or link the pieces your portfolio names, so a reader can open them. Each part may be written, or recorded as audio or video with a transcript; every form is graded by the same scoring criteria.

Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

The rebuilt sentences, the rationales, the tool choice, the cover letter, the message, and the reflection must be your own words about your own work. This version of the assignment asks for no AI tool at any step. Quote only words you can find in your own files or in the classmate's paragraph above, copied exactly, and never from memory.

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