WRD 104: Composition & Rhetoric II Rotating Header Image

Week 10: Portfolio Editing Checklist

We’ll add to this in class during Week 10 as needed, in our search for — and our practice of — cognitive vigilance in editing with a goal of visual & logistical coherence:

  • If you’d like to change the default DePaul banner, feel free, but make your own; no stock or Google photos. Digital writing portfolio banners can be rhetorically compelling if they evoke the writer’s environment, ethos, or tone.
  • Add short descriptive annotations to each project section for readers who may not be aware of how we approached, planned, and completed projects. It’s good practice to summarize the assignment and your approach to it.
  • Confirm that all elements of your Contextual Analysis Project are accounted for and easily accessible.
  • Where to put your Process Description? As a page in your reflective essay, where you can link to it? Or in your contextual analysis section, where can also link to it?
  • Confirm that your previous work is edited and proofread, with a serif font and appropriate white space for readability.
  • Main “home page” should introduce you and your work. The rhetoric of a portfolio home page is that it announces the successful completion of WRD104; include enough overview and guidance such that readers know what to do after reading it, and why.

After-class updates, Monday:

  • Work the critical-thinking angle — feel free to quote directly from this, http://composing.org/wrd104sq2015/a-well-cultivated-critical-thinker/ — so that you can tell us about how it applies to you; how, when, and where you rose to a critical-thinking challenge in our class; and where you see critical thinking fitting in your life overall. (I’m attaching a red pill if you need it.) Remember, “good writing” is not only clean grammar and mechanics — it’s the result of ongoing, rigorous, critical & reflective thinking.
  • If you don’t have a wolf sentence in your final draft, then use your portfolio as a safety net: address it there — what do your sources’ values, positions, ideologies, and rhetorical strategies tell you about your inquiry question and issue? (“Every wolf in Yellowstone therefore is more than just a wolf. Imbued with profound symbolic meaning, each wolf embodies the divergent goals of competing social movements involved in the reintroduction debate.” — http://composing.org/wrd104sq2015/every-wolf-in-yellowstone-therefore-is-more-than-just-a-wolf/)
  • What kind of reader are you? What kind of reader do you want to be? What role does reading play in your life? Arthur Miller — ‘A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.’

After-class updates, Wednesday: