Unit 7

With this unit you will do the following

Generate Ideas

• Become familiar with and practice strategies for generating ideas or exploring specific topics, issues, ideas, or beliefs.
• Develop critical and formal strategies for identifying and addressing a variety of rhetorical situations.
• Develop strategies to analyze various written and visual texts, both their own and other people's.

Read Critically

• Identify the assumptions they bring to encounters with new texts, ideas, and situations and analyze how those assumptions may shape their reading of and response to those texts, ideas, and situations.
• Use appropriate research strategies to identify and integrate a variety of ideas and evidence from human, Internet, and library resources into original, cohesive, written texts.

Generate Texts Collaboratively

• Consult with other writers about successive drafts.
• Respond to other writers about their drafts.
• Evaluate the usefulness of other writers' suggestions.
• Incorporate appropriate suggestions into a text.

Use Style Rhetorically

• Presented with the need to write within a specific rhetorical situation, students will be able to identify texts that respond to similar situations and analyze the rhetorical conventions and strategies of those texts in a way that will enable them to use similar conventions and strategies in their own writing.
• Take the stylistic risks necessary to develop appropriate sentence structures.
• Edit and proofread their own writing and the writing of others until final drafts are virtually error-free and in compliance with the grammatical and mechanical demands of the rhetorical situation.

Introduction

This semester in English 101 you have been writing every day, and you probably still have work to do to make sure your portfolio represents your best possible work.  Even so, this final unit may well be the most important part of the course in terms of your own learning.  Research suggests that when students take time to look back at the work they have done, analyze it carefully, and write about their findings, they will benefit in a number of important ways.  There are some fancy words for this--meta-cognition and reflection are two of them--but whatever it's called, the kind of intellectual work that goes in to this Final Analytical Essay is, first and foremost, an opportunity for you to discover, analyze, record, and demonstrate your own learning about thinking, writing, researching and the relationships among the three.

Description

This is the final paper, and it is meant to be a testament to the work you have done and the progress you have made this semester. Your audience for this paper is me and the writing program.

Look back over your first drafts, peer reviews, revisions, instructor comments, audience or forum analyses, research logs, and unit analyses and look at what changes you made to each paper along the way. Think about why you made those changes.

Think about the people you worked with (in and out of class) when you wrote these papers. How did working collaboratively help or hinder your writing?

Look over your electronic folder materials and think about how far you have come this semester and how much work you have done.

Look at your favorite papers from this class. Why are they your favorite? What do they illustrate about you and about your writing (skill, style, voice, research, audience address, collaborative abilities, critical thinking)?

Look over your least favorite papers from this class. Why don't you like them as much? What do they illustrate about your writing or about the kind of writing you enjoy doing or excel at?

Think about the day-to-day work you did in this class and out of this classroom: hours upon hours gazing glossy-eyed into a computer screen. What was it all good for?

Give plenty of specific examples from your own work to illustrate the changes you have made this semester. If a peer made a helpful comment, what was that comment and how did it affect your final paper? If you chose not to use a suggestion you got from me or from a peer, why did you make this decision (and here’s where you as the writer are the final judge of your own work…trust your instincts and your decisions, but also discuss them).

• What papers did you choose to globally revise and why? (name the topic, etc)
• What revisions did you decide to make?
• Why did you decide to revise that way rather than another way?
• What did you think about as you revised these papers?
• What do they illustrate about your talents or skills as a writer?
• What do they illustrate about what you’ve learned this semester?
• What things do you plan to work on when you leave this class?
• What do you wish you had learned this semester?

Time/space permitting you could also address the following:

• What problems did you experience this semester?
• What revisions should the writing program make to this class, its syllabus, its requirements, its grading standards?
• What should I (Lori) do differently next time?
• What should the Writing Program think about as they revise this course over the summer?

Look at the enormous amount of work you did this semester, and smile because it's almost over!

Unit Requirements

This final paper will serve as a 5-7 page introduction to and reflexive analysis of your final portfolio. It will be word processed in 12pt, Times New Roman font. Include all drafts and instructor and peer responses to this portfolio analysis with your final portfolio.

Grading

Please consult the grading standards at the back of the Course Guide to see how your work will be assessed. Note that you will not be given an advisory grade for this unit, but that it is one of the most important units in your final portfolio.

Terms

For an explanation of any of the terms used in this assignment sheet, please consult the glossary of terms.