The writing portfolio documents your progress as a writer over your first three SAGES seminars and provides the University with programmatic feedback that will be used to enhance future seminars. You should select your best work from each of your SAGES seminars to submit in your final portfolio. You are welcome to consult your writing instructor, faculty seminar leaders, the Writing Resource Center, or the SAGES Peer Writing Crew in developing your writing portfolio. (To make an appointment with the Writing Resource Center, please visit WCOnline; to make an appointment with the SAGES Peer Writing Crew, please visit TutorTrac.)
Please note: Students alone are responsible for providing copies of their work in their final portfolios. Individual seminar instructors and/or the Writing Resource Center can discuss strategies for archiving written work and for building the portfolio, but they do not retain copies of essays for students.
PORTFOLIO REQUIREMENTS
The writing portfolio must contain the following material in order:
(Please do not use staples. We prefer paper clips [small and one final jumbo paper clip]. A folder is also not necessary.)
- Submission Form (download here)
- A 2- to 3-page reflective essay (see guidelines below)
- One essay from your First Seminar
- One essay from a University Seminar
- A research paper from your other University Seminar. This paper is typically 10 to 12 pages; at a minimum, it must contain 8 pages of prose (not counting the bibliography). The research essay must integrate and cite primary and/or secondary source material and include a properly formatted bibliography (see additional details below).
All essays submitted in your writing portfolio should be your own work. Faculty reviewers do not encourage the inclusion of collaboratively written papers, but if you wish to include multi-authored work, you must justify its inclusion and explain your individual contribution to the final product in a reader’s note (~1 page) attached to the front of the essay. No more than one such project may be included in the final portfolio.
Reflective Essay
The reflective essay provides an introduction to the work included in your portfolio. It is a new piece of writing, though you may wish to consult your First Seminar reflection paper (if you completed one) as you compose this essay. The reflective essay should explain why you selected each of the papers you included in your portfolio, and it should assess your current strengths and weaknesses as a writer. The essay must include quotations from your own work and may also include feedback from your seminar leaders and co-instructors.
You are welcome to choose the narrative mode for this essay, telling the story of your writing experience in SAGES seminar by seminar. Whatever approach you take, be sure to offer concrete examples and explanations of your strengths and weaknesses. Simply stating that you are now “a better writer” than you were when you started is not enough. Instead, demonstrate your strengths by offering examples from your work that showcase your ability to write thoughtful, analytical essays that display mastery of the SAGES writing outcomes.
In your reflective essay, consider answering some of the following questions: What do you think you achieved in the essays you selected? What did you learn in the process of writing and revising them? How do the essays collected in the portfolio demonstrate your writing strengths? What areas of your writing will you continue working to improve? What themes or questions emerge from your writing experience in SAGES?
Research Essay
Your portfolio must contain a research paper, ideally from one of your two University Seminars. By "research paper," SAGES means a sustained engagement with an academic conversation—summarizing and critiquing what others have said on your topic—that includes your own novel claim or argument. This paper must do more than catalog the research you have done (i.e., an annotated bibliography is not sufficient); it should demonstrate your ability to synthesize academic research on a specific topic and to offer your own analysis or critical intervention. Such a paper will have a single controlling idea that represents your own thinking about the topic. A laboratory report, therefore, is not an appropriate substitute unless it goes well beyond reporting the procedure and results of an experiment.
The research paper should be 10-12 pages, not including a title page, figures, and bibliography. The absolute minimum length is 8 pages.
If you did not have the opportunity to write a research paper in either of your University Seminars (a fact you would document by submitting copies of the syllabi from those seminars), or if your SAGES research papers are insufficiently long, consult the SAGES director (peter.whiting@case.edu) about the possibility of submitting a paper from a non-SAGES course.
Portfolio Assessment
Your portfolio will be evaluated for completeness (i.e., all of the papers present, appropriate, and complete), and your reflective essay will be assessed based on the following criteria:
1. It offers a detailed assessment of your strengths and/or weaknesses as a writer at the point you completed your First and University Seminars;
2. It uses specific examples, quotations, and evidence from the essays included in the portfolio to support your assessment; and
3. It is thoroughly proofread and edited for clarity and coherence.
Notification
After your portfolio has been evaluated, you will receive the results by email. Most complete portfolios are deemed satisfactory. If your portfolio is judged unsatisfactory, you will be advised how you might improve it for the next submission. You must produce a satisfactory portfolio in order to meet the University's composition requirement and qualify for graduation.