Need to write self reflection about what I have wrote during the semester!

Creative Writing Portfolios: ENGL 221

Guidelines for Creative Portfolios and Portfolio Reflection

Your portfolio and your reflections on it present you as a writer this semester. It is about development, about growing knowledge and skills, and demonstrating that change and knowledge.

Portfolio

A portfolio, done correctly, asks you to demonstrate several skills and a range of knowledge. You must select the pieces you want to use, revise them, arrange them, and reflect on them. Your reflections not only serve as an introduction (or a conclusion, depending upon where you want to place one) for your portfolio, they also allow you to demonstrate and discuss the skills you are developing and the knowledge you have gained. The pieces you include in the portfolio work with the reflections, providing evidence to support your claims. If, for example, you feel you have learned how to use more concrete details in your writing, you can point to that specifically, asking the reader to look at the second page of your short story and compare it to the draft, or to read the three versions of a poem you wrote, each increasingly more specific and effective. If you have been able to include more personal information in your poems or stories, explain how and tell us what we will read or what we have read that reflects that. If you have learned how to assist peers more effectively in their writing, demonstrate that for a reader with your critique.

Additionally, if you feel you are struggling with a poem, story, play, memoir—any piece—using the reflection to work through that struggle helps readers understand the kinds of decisions you’ve made and what you want to accomplish. Some writers revise dozens of times and work for years on one piece—why? Writing, particularly creative writing, can be very personal, and the reflection can reveal more about YOU, engaging readers in the struggle to create, the work of shaping a piece and your own thoughts. Because this portfolio is part of a class, the “support for claims” part is relevant. But outside of a class—and even within!—the act of creation goes far beyond claim and support.

All three genres of writing must be included in the portfolio. In addition, you should ask your peers if advice you have given them has been helpful. If so, you may include a copy of those comments in your portfolio. If you did a critique and the writer found it helpful and can explain to you what was most helpful, you can and should include that and your reflections on it.

The order of the portfolio contents is up to you. You must have least three poems, at least one piece of fiction, and your creative non-fiction/play. You may have no more than five poems and two examples of fiction. You may include some draft materials as appropriate, and don’t worry about comments being written on them. These aren’t “pristine” showcases, but they are also not a “dumping ground” for your semester’s work. You must have a table of contents. Please number all pages—you can do this by hand. You must hold all the materials together in some fashion—a folder with pockets, a very large clip, etc. If you are artistic, you are welcome to decorate your binder if you wish. Feel free to include photos or graphics, but understand that a picture of your best friend or parent or house doesn’t substitute for the text. You may give your portfolio a title, as you do poems, fiction, songs, etc.

Digital portfolios: these should include whatever you are including in your hard copy, IF you have it in a digital form. Often, the pieces on the “doesn’t need to be read, but I might refer to it” side of your physical portfolio has handwritten material from, say, class exercises. You may have drafts of poems or materials that are hand-written that do not appear in your digital portfolio. You can create a digital portfolio by combining multiple word files into one document and inserting page numbers.

To make this simpler:

Requirements:

1. All genres represented.

2. 3-5 poems

3. 1-2 pieces of fiction

4. 1 example of creative non-fiction/play

5. Reflections on each creative genre

6. 1 written critique of a classmate’s draft

7. Table of contents

8. Page numbers

9. Container/binder/clip, with cover page with author’s name

Reflection

As I’ve done over the course of the semester, I will NOT grade your creative writing. But I WILL grade you on your ability to articulate thoroughly and thoughtfully the kinds of writerly decisions you have made over the semester and on your ability to explain and demonstrate your knowledge.

I realize that knowledge often precedes skill—you can “know” about writing a sestina, for example, but you may still not be able to do it well. You can critique someone else’s work well, but not yet be able to do, yourself, all that you recommend the other writer attempt in revising. So the reflections throughout the portfolio explain why something is chosen, why it is in the order it is in the portfolio, and its development and YOUR development as a writer in relation to your own and to the pieces around it.

Each reflection must be specific as well as give an overview. It’s great to learn what prompted the piece and what you wanted to accomplish and why it means a lot to you. But many writers stop at that point, and really, that doesn’t get at the CRAFT of writing—it is much more about the inspiration for your writing. So in addition to telling us that you were inspired to write piece X about your grandmother because of a peer’s comment and that you love your grandmother, you need to tell us how you crafted the tension of the flash fiction plot, why you included this trait or that in a character, why you broke lines where you did, why you chose a particular image to anchor your poem, why you focused on this aspect of setting in your non-fiction but let this other element of setting go, why you chose these two scenes above all others for your play. In other words, AFTER the muse has struck, YOU are the one who crafts, revises, reshapes what may already be a good piece. And where might it go from here? What is the future of this piece? Where does it still need work? Why?

For example, you may take us through multiple drafts of a poem, explaining why you made the decisions you did, good or bad. You may tell us how a comment from someone sparked a story, but other elements came from experience, readings, etc. As you explore how you’ve developed as a writer, you may point to early difficulties and show us how you improved the work by gaining a new technique or how you WOULD improve it, if you were going to rework that piece. This last approach might mean that you look only at a paragraph or chunk of dialogue and revise that for us in your reflective essay, without revising the entire piece.

One KEY ELEMENT of your reflections is that you must use the disciplinary language that you have been gaining from reading Starkey and Lamott. Don’t say “this part of the story” when you can say “As the story reaches the peak of rising action and enters the climax…” Don’t say “I used sound to support my images” when you can say “I used assonance, repeated the long sounds of ‘ooh’ through this stanza to slow the reader down and prepare him/her for the image of a slowly rising tide.” All fields have their own “jargon,” and learning to use this “shorthand” matters!

The reflective pieces thus provide support for your claims of developing skills, weave in the process by which you created pieces, getting them to the point they are now, and articulate your concerns and goals.

I will be grading reflections with an eye toward:

· The thoroughness of your discussion and exploration of the material;

· Your ability to tie your discussion and claims of learning or skills to specific pieces or elements of the creative piece being reflected upon;

· Your use of disciplinary and genre-specific language;

· Your ability to tie your learning to sources (the book, readings, peers, specific comments, in-class exercises, etc.);

· Your contextualization of the creative piece and your reflection with the overall portfolio contents (reflections do build on one another!);

· Correctness in the conventions of standard written American English.

There is no opportunity to revise these reflections as they come in as part of your final.

Have fun putting this together! I always enjoy reading them!

FAQ:

May I put in a couple more pieces than allowed, if I can make the case that they are important?

No. One important part of a portfolio is learning to evaluate and select. Just as you likely wouldn’t send out everything you ever wrote for publication, you will begin to understand your themes, strengths, and struggles by reading, evaluating, and selecting just a few representative pieces.

May I refer to pieces that I don’t select?

Yes, but don’t expect the reader to go back through the side of the portfolio where you have put those items. A reference is just that. If there is material that you now consider a draft or something you rejected for inclusion but which is relevant to claims you are making, you should pull out a an excerpt or summarize for the reader. Don’t try to sneak in an extra piece by including all of it, most of it, or making it central to your reflection. If version one of a piece of short fiction was “failed,” in your opinion, we don’t need to read all of it to understand why—you should be able to summarize those failures in a sentence.

May I put short introductions to each piece in the portfolio as I go, not just in the reflection?

Yes. BUT (BIG WARNING) because this information is separated out from the reflection, what often happens is that the genre reflection itself suffers from lack of specifics: examples, discussions of process/revision, etc. What writers have found helpful is to carefully consider what they might want to write SPECIFICALLY about a piece (and why separate it out?) and resituate that material into the reflection itself. Here is where a reader’s comments and your attention to revision will really help you decide what belongs where.

May I use fewer pieces?

If by “fewer” you mean you stay at the minimum. All genres must be represented. You are permitted a range here. If we can’t get a good sense of your writing because you’ve included too little, you have undermined your reflection and your presentation of yourself as a writer. You have less to work with.

May I put in illustrations?

Of course! Maybe you have written about a place or a person important to you. If you want to include a photograph or illustration of some kind, feel free to do so. Remember that the illustration supports and complements the writing, which is the crucial element for this class and for the portfolio.

May I have an introduction and conclusion?

Yes. But think of how these two pieces interact with the reflection. What are they saying that doesn’t belong in that genre reflection? How do they shift the reader’s perspective? Many writers like how including them creates a “bracket” for the portfolio. However, sometimes what’s in those pieces actually belongs in the reflections.

Does it matter where I put the reflection?

Absolutely! Not in terms of some rule about where it must go. But if you see the reflection as part of this portfolio, do you want us to read the reflection BEFORE we read the creative non-fiction? That pre-disposes us to read in a certain way, to focus on certain elements. If we read it AFTER the creative non-fiction, we will have had our own opinions and foci, and your reflection will now alter those, which is a different task. Do you want to put a reflection BETWEEN two short-shorts? After the last one? Consider how placement interacts with a reader’s experience of your portfolio!

May I talk about what readers said as they were reading through the portfolio?

Yes. This is also part of your learning, after all. You made decisions based on feedback, and sometimes you decided NOT to do what readers told you. Why? How much of what is published is “yours” pre-feedback and how much is shaped by opinions and ideas after it is written? How does a writer put together a book of short stories or a volume of poetry? Many authors include an introduction or foreword that explains the way the book took shape. You can put that information into your reflection or you may find it belongs elsewhere. In fact, you may discuss what kinds of feedback you are most open to and when and what you seem to more routinely reject and why. This is all part of understanding who you are as a crafter of writing and sharing that with readers.

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