Criteria for the Portfolio

Audience: You and your site partner specify the audiences for various documents. How well your writing communicates to its target audience for its stated purpose is the key criterion I’ll use to judge the effectiveness of your portfolio documents. The only audiences you cannot write to in this portfolio are advanced students and experts in your field.

Purpose: You specify the purpose appropriate to your audience in consultation with your site partner. You must be clear about your goal in writing and what you anticipate will be readers’ goals for reading.

Focus: Help your reader appropriately by announcing what you'll cover in the paper. A narrowly focused, clearly stated focus is both easier for readers to grasp and easier for you to develop or support. No matter what kind of document you prepare, you’ll almost certainly need to orient the reader to your overall point with some kind of focusing or forecasting statement. In other words, where you’re headed with the document shouldn’t be a question for readers as they move through your texts.

Development: Support your points with specific detail from sources appropriate for your audience and purpose. Details stick in readers’ mind and make your point more effectively than do general statements. Check each point in your paper and make sure you develop it up with adequate explanation or detail. You may include your own analytic thinking and personal experience where appropriate for the rhetorical context you specify.

Organization: Arrange your paper in a coherent, readable, logical manner. Avoid merely providing summaries of sources or a patchwork of material taken from various sources.

Sources and Documentation: We'll talk in class about ways to integrate source material and information about sources into your papers. In general, plan to incorporate source information into your sentences. Very few of your site partner contexts will call for footnotes or endnote citations, but see me if you think you have such a document. You must clearly quote even paraphrased material and identify sources whenever you use them, including interviews and any informal survey data.

Style: Write in a style that is clear and readable with few, if any, grammatical, mechanical or usage errors. Make stylistic choices appropriate for your audience. If your site partner asks you to use an institutional or corporate style, do so, and let me know if you need help figuring out what that style requires you to do.

Layout: Although some site partners don’t want you to work on final format for your texts, visuals and headings will almost certainly help you develop and organize your texts. Headings often signal the organization of your paper. Visuals—graphs, tables, charts, pictures—can all enhance the appeal of your papers and help you explain complex concepts, so use them if they're appropriate given your audience and purpose.