Required Midterm Reflection


Required Midterm Reflection - due Wednesday October 22nd

 

Your midterm reflection must include the following elements:

 

1. Graphical representation of your writing/composing process

2. A reflective cover letter that addresses how you are meeting the following student learning outcomes completed to date:

-modes of blogging and informal writing: academic, political/community-based, and personal

-situating your writing: Analyzing, synthesizing, and composing with sources

composing processes: argument and persuasion

-multimedia: visual analysis and composition, aural analysis and composition

-collaborative, coordinated, or distributed writing: linking, interacting, and responding in writing to/with peers.

-writing in the disciplines: connecting your writing to research and scholarship in a specific field

Community Writing (outside of academia)

 

 

This cover letter should directly address our 4 primary modes of evaluation: rhetorical knowledge, critical thinking/reading/writing, process, and knowledge of conventions. The following questions are meant to be heuristic to help get you thinking in a reflective mode:

 

Rhetorical Knowledge

Audience: What have you learned about addressing an audience in _____ writing?

Purpose: What have you learned about the purposes of ___ writing?

Rhetorical Situation: How did the writing context affect your ____ text? How did your choice of topic affect the research you conducted and how you presented your exploration to your readers?

Voice and Tone: How would you describe your voice in this project? Your tone? How do they contribute to the effectiveness of your essay?

Context, Medium, and Genre: How did your context determine the medium and genre you chose, and how did those decisions affect your writing?

Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing

Learning/ Inquiry: How did you decide what to focus on in your writing? Describe the process you went through to focus on a main idea, or thesis. How did you judge what was most and least important in your exploratory writing?

Responsibility: How did you fulfill your responsibilities to your readers?

Reading and Research: What research did you conduct? How sufficient was the research you did? Why? What additional research might you have done?

Overall: As a result of writing this _________, how have you become a more critical thinker, reader, and writer? What critical thinking, reading, and writing skills do you hope to develop further in your next writing project? How will you work on them?

 

Composing Processes

Invention: What invention strategies were most useful to you? Why?

Organizing Your Ideas and Details: What organization strategies have you used and learned? How successful was have they been?

Revising: What one revision did you make that you are most satisfied with? What are the strongest and the weakest parts of the paper or other piece of writing you wrote for this chapter? Why? If you could go back and make an additional revision, what would it be?

Working with Peers: How did your instructor or peer readers help you by making comments and suggestions about your writing? List some examples of useful comments that you received. List some examples of how you revised your exploration based on those comments and suggestions. How could you have made better use of the comments and suggestions you received? How could your peer readers help you more on your next assignment? How might you help them more, in the future, with the comments and suggestions you make on their texts?

Graphic, Visual, & Digital Composing: If you used photographs or other visuals to help present your exploration to readers, what did you learn about incorporating these elements?

Becoming a Writer: What writerly habits have you developed, modified, or improved on as you constructed the assignments for this class? How will you change your future writing activities, based on what you have learned about yourself?

Conventions

Editing: What sentence-level problems did you find most frequently in your writing? How will you avoid that problem in future assignments?

Genre: What conventions of the genre, if any, gave you problems?

Documentation: If you used sources for your paper, what documentation style did you use? What problems, if any, did you have with it?

 

Writing Technologies

Think about the ways that you have used digital technologies over the course of the semester. What technologies are you using to facilitate the act of writing? How are you using them? What have been the benefits and drawbacks of the writing technologies you use specific to the rhetorical situation you have used them in?