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The Reflection

Cover letters & a final reflection essay

What is the Cover Letter?

The cover letter is a short (1.5 to 2-page) informal reflection that you will paste at the top of the narrative and analysis second drafts (the reflection is built into the research project). In this cover letter, you will detail what you learned during each writing unit. I will read your cover letter prior to reading your essay, so use the cover letter as an opportunity to communicate what you want me to know. 

Why reflect?

One of the best tools we have for learning is reflection, which helps us reinforce our knowledge. And that’s because our awareness of what we know grows and fortifies when we consciously build a vocabulary for naming and discussing what we know. A major goal of this composition course, then, is for you to reflect on your learning and writing practices. These cover letters will further serve this purpose later since you will be referencing them in your final reflection essay, due at the end of the semester. The reflection essay is like a larger-form cover letter for your entire portfolio.

What’s the format and style?

Cover letters can be written in essay or letter format (but not numbered or bulleted format). Language differences are most welcome. Informality is most welcome. The most important thing is that you are capturing your perspectives, experiences, and knowledge. 

What to include?

In each cover letter, you should reflect on these questions (in no particular order): 

  1. Who is your audience and how did you tailor your language and rhetorical choices to appeal to them and/or meet their needs?
  2. What are some of the most meaningful insights you’ve gained in this phase (and through writing this assignment) regarding language and literacy (as topics you’re learning about and as practices you’re developing)? 
  3. What concepts/terms have most impacted your learning and your writing practices (e.g., rhetoric; rhetorical situation; context; exigence; purpose; author; audience; text; genre; argument; evidence; something else)? How so? 
  4. In what ways has this phase’s assignment helped you to achieve (some/any of) the Course Learning Outcomes? (These outcomes are listed in the syllabus and offered below for convenience.) Please provide actual examples (e.g., moments in/after class or through the completion of certain assignments) and please actually refer to and quote at least one Course Learning Outcome.
  5. What would you have changed if you had more time?

What is the Reflection Essay?

The Reflection Essay, which will serve as an introduction to your Portfolio, is a kind of research paper. Your development as a writer is the subject and your work this semester is your evidence. Thus, your task is to demonstrate, with evidence, how you’ve developed as a writer and thinker this semester. Evidence may come in the form of a quote or screenshot of your work or through your retelling of a central learning moment. Your cover letters, homework assignments, and in-class reflections should serve as valuable sources of information and provide you with quote-worthy passages. And you should include in your Portfolio any relevant items that you reference in your Reflection Essay.

This essay answers this question: To what extent have I achieved the course learning objectives this semester? Importantly, then, your essay should quote and respond to each of our course learning objectives below. That said, your essay should not be organized in the bulleted format in which the objectives are presented.

Your Reflection Essay should be 3 to 4 pages (12-point font, 1-inch margins, double spaced) plus any images you choose to include. It will not be evaluated on whether or not you have achieved the course goals, but on how well you demonstrate your understanding of the goals that you have achieved and your thoughts about the goals that you have not achieved. Please use MLA citation within the body of your essay and on a Works Cited page as needed. Compose a relative and inviting title for your essay. As always, you are encouraged to personalize the delivery of your essay as you see fit. Thus, you decide the order, tone, style, and language you’ll craft in order to best reach your audience. You’re welcome to draw on your “native,” “home,” or “other” languages, literacies, and ways of being as you so choose.

Course learning outcomes

  1. Recognize the role of language attitudes and standards in empowering, oppressing, and hierarchizing languages and their users, and be open to communicating across different languages and cultures.
  2. Explore and analyze, in writing and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations.
  3. Develop strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing.
  4. Recognize and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations.
  5. Engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.
  6. Understand and use print and digital technologies to address a range of audiences.
  7. Locate research sources (including academic journal articles, magazine and newspaper articles) in the library’s databases or archives and on the Internet and evaluate them for credibility, accuracy, timeliness, and bias.
  8. Compose texts that integrate your stance with appropriate sources using strategies such as summary, critical analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and argumentation.
  9. Practice systematic application of citation conventions.