Directions for the Narrative Course Reflection

This is to be the first text that anyone reads when they visit your ePortfolio. This essay will tell the story of your reading, writing, and learning during the First Year Writing Course. It should include all of your experience, both when it comes to writing and when it comes to what you learned from your classmates. You might have learned what it means to write multimodally, something about the Dominican Republic, or how to search for peer reviewed scholarly articles. When a reader finishes your Narrative Course Reflection, they should have an idea about the choices you made as a writer and feel convinced that you engaged with the course material and learned about writing and about the topics you choose to write about. Anyone, even people who didn’t take the class, could write, “I learned so much! I loved this class!” You might make that claim, but you'll need to include evidence of your work in your Narrative Course Reflection. 

You need to quote from some of the papers you wrote, some of the feedback you gave to other writers, and some of the feedback you received from Prof. Torg and your classmates. This paper should be at least 800 words long. You’ll be graded on how specifically you tell your unique story of working in this class, on the degree to which you convince me that you’ve engaged with the material, and that your essay is polished.

The first draft of the Narrative Course Reflection goes in the assignments tab of your ePort. Call it, "NCR First Draft." The final draft of the Narrative Course Reflection has its own section of the ePort. It should be the section that a reader first sees. It should set up the rest of your work. A person reading your NCR should feel intrigued enough to go click around on some of the work you did this semester. 

Don’t assume your reader knows everything you have done. Imagine some of the following audiences: next year’s freshman who might wonder what class with Prof. Torg is like and what they might focus on for their work, one of Prof. Torg’s fellow composition teachers who wants a glimpse of what he does with his classes, an administrator at SJU who doesn’t know you, and of course Prof. Torg and your classmates. Writing often has this component where some audiences are known but others are not. 

Here are some prompts to help you get ideas about what you might write. Use your responses as the raw materials for the content of your paper. Don’t forget to give your paper a title that captures your unique experience in this course. Begin your paper by making a statement about yourself as a writer and your feelings about taking the course. When you came to class, you were a writer who________. As the class progressed you______________. In the end, as a writer, you think/believe/want __________________.  

1. Introduce yourself to potential readers by sharing some specific details about your work in this class and as writer. Don’t say you wrote an I Search paper. Say you wrote specifically about X because of X and you learned X. State what worked well, what was new, what was a struggle. Avoid the obvious. Focus on telling your unique story in this class.
2. For me, writing is like…. (finish that line in one or more ways and explain)
3. Was there anything about reading your classmates' work that you think impacted your writing or thinking?
4. What progress would you say you made as a writer this semester? What do you need to work on? What are keys to you being able to write well?
5. What new experiences or ideas did you encounter in this class? 
6. What topics did you address in this class? Why did you make those choices?
7. Is there something you are able to do now that you wouldn’t have thought to do before taking this class?
8. If you received any interesting feedback from Prof. Torg or your classmates that you found particularly useful, quote it in your paper. If you think you did an extra-good job responding to other students, tell us about that and maybe quote some of the feedback you gave your classmates. What experiences (good and bad) did you have that might be hidden from Prof. Torg and your classmates? What work did you do that few would know about? For example, if you went to the writing center five times, none of us would know. If you got interested in a subject so much that you went to read a book or more articles about it, we wouldn't know that. 
9. List three things you learned NOT about writing during this class. In other words, you learned something, but it isn’t necessarily related directly to writing. Maybe you learned something from your classmates, about your ability to keep up with work, about technology, or you started to think about new things because of being in this community of writers and thinkers.
10. How will you use the activities of this class in the future? Can you apply your experiences in this class to future classes or the living of your life?
11. What are you most likely to remember about this class in the years to come?

Use your answers to the questions above to organize an essay that explains your learning this semester and evaluates your strengths and weaknesses as a writer.

Look over your answers and ask yourself, "Where is a good place to start? What will I transition into next? How will I connect the different parts of this paper? Does the title, first parargraph and last seem to work together well? What is a good thing to end on?"