First and Last Name FCW [insert class time and meeting days] Professor Mangini Mid-term Reflective

Narrative: Draft # _____ Due: Reflective Narrative Purpose: Please provide a story that narrates your processes of writing and learning in FCW. The reflective narrative should use vivid detail and rich description to show yourself and your readers how you have approached composing each of your writing assignments in FCW. Your portfolio readers will use this narrative as a way to gain a better understanding of you as a person, student, and writer, so they can better assess your work. This reflective narrative will be included in your midterm portfolio and, after revisions, will also be included in your final portfolio. As such, even if you are not including an essay in the portfolio, you must reflect upon your experiences with writing the essaythat way readers have more information to make a decision about your portfolio. Audience: Your primary audience is yourself. Your secondary audience is your course instructor and other FCW instructors who will read your midterm and final portfolios. Focus: In the narrative, you can focus on experiences that relate directly to this courseexperiences such as in-class writing, journaling, peer review, readings, revisions, teacher-student conference, etc. You can cite your own work within the narrative. For example, you might provide a thesis statement from a first draft and also the revised thesis statement from the final draftand then discuss how and why you revised the thesis. You can also lift multiple genres from your journals and incorporate those pieces into the narrative. To illustrate, if you created a list to brainstorm for an essay, you could provide the list in your reflectionfollowed by a thoughtful discussion about prewriting techniques. But you dont have to limit the story to the classroom. In most cases, a strong reflective narrative will combine academic elements with influences from your private life. As such, you might describe the room where you write, the people with whom you share your work, or the music you listen to while freewriting. In addition, you can discuss how you negotiated the struggles that come along with working on a writing assignment. Thus, you could recount the time your computer crashed and you wrote the essay by hand, or the time you had to work a double-shift at work and had less time to write, or how your team lost a big game and writing an essay seemed like the last thing you wanted to do. There are two main reasons you are encouraged to write about your academic and private lives as well as your successes and struggles with writing. First, honest, personal writing adds depth and authenticity to your narrative. Remember Peter Elbows frank conversation about his process for solving some of his difficulties with writing. Second, if your reflective narrative situates you as someone who is writing in a particular place and time, portfolio readers will gain clearer insight into your writing processes, so they can read your portfolios from a more dynamic context, one that is more connected to youas opposed to assessing an end-product collection of essays with just words on a page. Style: Your narrative should be conversational and reflect your voice. Still, the narrative should illustrate elements of formal writing as well: focus, organization, clear transitions, citations of your own writing, etc. You are also encouraged to incorporate multiple genres and narrative writing techniques into your story, including description, dialogue, and metaphor.

Process: Throughout the semester, you will write in a journal to explore ideas, make meaning, and reflect on your processes of writing. Your journal writing, then, will serve as a source for your reflective narrative. At times, you will lift unedited material from your journal and incorporate that text into your narrative. Other times, you will read your journal and revise generative ideas into a more fully developed piece of writing for your reflective narrative. The reflective narrative must discuss each of the essays you have written for FCW (one at midterm evaluation and three at finals), so we will engage in multiple journal writing exercises for each assignment. You will write and rewrite this assignment throughout the semester, so the sooner you start transitioning journal content into your narrative, the more time you will have to revise your work Also, you will make your life a bit easier by approaching this assignment in small stepswriting and reflecting as you gorather than waiting until the last minute. Product: Please staple this assignment sheet to the back of your reflective narrative. Before submitting your portfolio, make sure your reflective narrative fulfills the following requirements: _____ My reflective narrative describes my writing and reading processes for each of my FCW essays. _____ My reflective narrative refers to my journal or blog for source material. _____ My reflective narrative addresses all seven values for FCW (*view list below). _____ My reflective narrative is at least four pages long (should be at least two full pages at midterm). _____ My reflective narrative uses Time New Rowan 12 pt. font and one inch margins. _____ My reflective narrative has an original title. __________________________________________________________________________________ *The narrative should show how you have addressed seven core values of this course. We will cover the values in class. Below is a list of the seven values: 1. Understand that writing is a multi-stage, recursive and social process. 2. Understand that writing is shaped by audience, purpose, and context. 3. Understand how texts represent meaning and how the processes of writing and reading create and interpret meaning. 4. Understand the conventions of academic writing and Standard Written English and the contexts in which adherence to these standards is expected. 5. Understand the role and use of information in writing. 6. Understand the responsibilities of a student, including the principles and practices of academic honesty. 7. Understand the power and ethical responsibility that come with the creation of written discourse.