Project 4: Composer’s Website

Your ePortfolio on Weebly

Overview: The Composer’s Website assignment is designed to showcase your understanding

of multi-modal rhetoric and web design, and to help you consider your personal and
academic achievements in a real-world, academic context. Websites like these are frequently
used by content creators to (1) keep track of their progress in a given field of study, (2) reflect
on their developing achievements in that field, and (3) to provide concrete evidence of those
achievements to future instructors, mentors, employers, publishers, etc. Therefore, the
purpose of this assignment is multi-faceted. You will:

• represent the best of the work you’ve done as a writer, reader, and critical thinker
• remediate that work for a web consumption using multiple modes of communication
(textual, visual, digital etc.)
• reflect on your accomplishments and how they demonstrate your achievement of WPA
outcomes and course goals

Part 1: About the Author (author picture and biographical statement: ~100 words)
Directions: Write a biographical statement for inclusion under an "Author's Note" section of
your website. Rather than highlighting your personal and social life, the statement you
compose should draw on your academic, work, and community service experiences.

Audience: Like other elements of your website, your biographical statement should be
appealing to an academic/professional audience. Eventually, you may end up with multiple
versions of your bio, one for a job at Fair Trade Cafe, another for the Fiesta Bowl Queen and
Court Scholarship, for example. What’s important to take from this assignment is that each
educational or professional context in which you share your website will most likely require an
approach to representing yourself that is unique to the particular situation or rhetorical
context. Considering the context of this course, it would make sense to highlight your literacy
skills and development as a reader, writer, and critical thinker.

Consider the following conventions as you compose/revise your author bio:

• Write about yourself in third-person (s/he). To achieve an objective and formal tone,
describe yourself and your achievements how someone else would.
• List your achievements in this: 1.) most recent-->past, 2.) education-->interests-->work--
>service, 3.) most significant-->least significant, etc.
• Focus on experiences related to your academic achievements and professional goals.

Part 2: About the Site (introductory rationale: ~150 words)

Provide explains the purposes of your website, frames your content, and orients readers to
the organization of your website. Elements you may want to cover:

• Purpose: Ask yourself: Why am I crafting this website? What will its purpose be? What are
my short and long term goals for creating this website?
• Audience: For whom am I creating this website? What are my different audiences'
expectations? (For each imagined audience/context, consider the appropriate tone of
voice, format, style, level of formality, diction, etc.)
• Context: How and where will I use my website? (i.e. circumstances and situations: interviews,
applications, advising, mentorships, classes, personal/professional development, self/
performance evaluation, etc.). What is the context and scope determined by your audiences
and purposes?
• Structure & Form: How will I organize my website? Which organizing principle makes the
most sense given my purpose and audience?

Part 3: Writing Projects and Remediation

Each of the major assignments written for this class, during this semester, should be
incorporated into your writer's website, each on its own page, each with a clearly labelled
navigational tab (either on the side bar or as a horizontal navigation tab). These artifacts
should demonstrate acquired WPA outcomes, developing literacy skills, or the achievement
of personal or professional goals. Additionally, these remediated versions of your essays
should demonstrate your consideration of course readings and concepts, audience feedback,
your own sensibilities, and attention the ways that multi-modal communication and visual
rhetoric influence persuasive writing.
Required Writing Projects

Writing Project 1 Writing Project 2 Writing Project 3 Writing Project 4

Personal Essay Primary Research Ethnography Portfolio Reflection

Remediated essays should be:
• Posted within a textbox of a unique page on your website
• Abide by the conventions for web reading and formatting (e.g. single-spaced, no
indentation, use of hyperlinks, video, audio, and images, etc.)
• The entire site and remediated essays should be designed with a consistent application of
design elements (e.g. regular font style and size for headings, subheadings, titles, and text
as well as a common layout and color scheme (we’ll talk about design principles in class).

Part 4: Portfolio Reflection (500 words)

As part of P4, you will write a reflection essay in which you discuss your development as a
reader, writer, and critical thinker and explain how your understanding of these have
developed throughout the semester. What do you know now, that you did not know then?
What can you do now, that you could not do then? Your reflection should be informed by
your student practices and the course outcomes. This reflections should show how your
experiences in this course have prepared you for success in the future (both personal and
professional). Your reflection should be supported by concrete evidence (i.e. quotes,
examples, screen shots, anecdotes, and other examples) from your own work and practices.
Your reflection should:

• Illustrate your current struggles, accomplishments, and abilities as a reader, composer, and
critical thinker.
• Include a thesis (i.e. a claim about what writing is)
• Support your statement about your writing and process with specific references to your own
work (i.e. notes, process work, passages from your essays, project reflections, feedback on
your peer's work, etc.).
• This "support" might take the form of quotes, screenshots, excerpts, narrated examples,
anecdotes, etc.
• Relate your writing and your process to the "WPA Outcomes Statement" (i.e. "Rhetorical
Knowledge," "Critical Thinking, Reading, and Composing," etc.)
• Relate your writing and your process to the "Framework for Success in Postsecondary
Writing”
• Show how your growth as a reader, composer, and critical thinker throughout first-year
composition prepares you for future writing goals and activities.

Due Dates
Initial Website Created (in class) 11/9
About the Author 11/12
About the Site 11/14
Rough Draft Due (link in discussion) 11/16
ePortfolio Submitted 12/2