You're almost there! By the end of this lesson, you'll have a solid writing portfolio filled with final drafts that showcase how your writing skills have grown and improved. If you follow the direction in this lesson carefully, your portfolio will include enough samples to give your teacher—or any other audience—a good idea of your current skills as a writer.
You probably already have a list of your best work in mind, or maybe in a folder. This lesson will ask you to examine these pieces once again and see if there are any ways to improve them. Since you wrote most of them weeks or months ago, you should be able to see each text with some objectivity, as one of your readers might. You'll be able to identify more easily what's still missing in each draft or what changes would make the text more successful and more representative of your current writing skills.
It may seem like a lot of work to put in for just one assignment. However, it's important to remember that a writing portfolio represents much more than a grade. Besides giving you a process for gathering and polishing your best work, it's also good practice for the next time you have to create a portfolio. Think that only happens in school? Think again! Here are some practical situations where you will have to gather your work and submit it to an audience for review.
Many scholarship applications for trade, technical, or academic institutions require some kind of portfolio. This definitely isn't something you can do at the last minute, and it isn't something you can put together with spare pieces of work you may having stuck in folders and drives. Saving your best work—and taking some time to polish it—is great preparation for when it really counts.
Many college and university instructors will require you to keep a portfolio of your work, and they will expect you to know, already, how to gather pieces for this purpose. While you might expect only English courses to require portfolios, most disciplines—like business, nursing, and the sciences—will require students to keep work as evidence of their learning. Get in the habit now and this will be one less skill you have to develop in the future.
Many different jobs require that applicants demonstrate they are competent in basic communication skills like reading and writing. In addition, you'll need to keep other examples of your knowledge, like resumes and letters of recommendation. If you plan on working in a specific field, such as a journalist or creative artist, you will have to constantly update your work to show potential clients what you can do.
When other people besides your teacher look at a portfolio, what do they expect it to contain? What skills should be present in the work?
