Writing a Reflective Self-Assessment for Your Portfolio

Everyone is charged with writing a reflective self-assessment as part of the portfolio, number 15, the asterisked item, which reads:

A paper that identifies your best piece of writing from this term, explaining why you think it is your best.

Since there are always questions about how to go about doing this here are some suggestions to help you get started. First, obviously you have to select the piece that you believe to be the best representation of what you can do as a writer. Now, there are innumerable reasons why anyone might select a particular piece. The key is exploring and explaining those reasons. To do that, you need to begin asking yourself a lot of questions, then crafting the answers into an organized paper. The simplest question to begin is derived by turning the prompt into a one, why do you think the selection your best?

Other questions you might consider:

  1. What are the strongest aspects of your writing skill in the piece?
  2. How did you go about writing the piece? What was your process?
  3. How has this piece evolved or improved in your revision(s) and over the course of the term?
  4. What kinds of problems did you encounter? How did you solve them?
  5. What are the weakest aspects of your writing skill that you had to address in the piece?
  6. How did you address and improve your weaknesses in the piece?
  7. How does your piece demonstrate your personal improvement as a writer over the course of the term?
  8. What goals did you set for yourself in writing or revising, if any? How did you attempt to accomplish them?

Of course, you do not need to answer all of these questions, but they are offered as a guide to get you started. If you come up with some on your own, that’s great too. Regardless, answering questions like these will help you reflect on both your experience and work, enabling you to write a quality self-assessment.

Also, consider using quotes from your piece that are relevant and specific to the idea that you are explaining in the reflection. Remember, your main purpose is to explain why the piece is your best, using evidence from the piece with support is a good way to accomplish the task.

Lastly, this piece is about your work and you as a writer. So you will need to use first person to do this. It is a personal reflection, after all. Keep it personal.

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Freshmen English

This college preparatory class concentrates thematically on the notion of growth through experience. All the major works in this course have been chosen to illuminate this idea in some fashion. Your analysis of the work will be concerned with exploring this primary theme, as well as additional themes and related questions. In addition, the class will always be concerned with the following overarching questions:

From whose viewpoint and from what angle or perspective are we reading?

How do we know when we know? What is the evidence and how reliable is it?

How are things, events, or people connected to each other?

What is the cause and what is the effect? How do they fit together?

What’s new and what’s old? Have we run across this idea?

So what? What does it matter? What does it all mean?

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