English 175: Professional Writing Portfolio

Summary

For your Professional Writing Portfolio, your will collect and revise your writing from throughout our course, together with (optionally) professional writing that you have done outside our course, and submit such writing as a portfolio of your professional writing skills and accomplishments.

Purpose and audience

The Professional Writing Portfolio enables you to showcase a range and depth of your skills and accomplishments that might not be visible in any single document. For the professor, the Portfolio enables you to revise your work and thereby show not only your initial assignment efforts but also your improvement throughout the course. For prospective employers, the Portfolio enables you to demonstrate your knowledge, skills, and accomplishments in workplace-related writing.

Portfolio documents

Throughout this course, save and revise all your formal course writing for inclusion in your Professional Writing Portfolio. Your Portfolio should include the following documents:

Portfolio Cover Letter
Employment Letter
R�sum�
Personal Correspondence and accompanying Memo
Proposal
Recommendation Report
(optional) out-of-class professional writing

Portfolio Cover Letter

In your Portfolio cover letter . . .

Introduce the documents included in your Portfolio. As your professor, I know their purposes and context, but a prospective employer would not know.
For a prospective employer's benefit, point to the main professional writing knowledge, skills, and accomplishments that these documents exemplify.
For my benefit, describe your main revision activities since I last saw each document. (For an employer, you would revise or remove such a passage.)
Discuss your professional writing expertise, strategies, and best practices that might not be directly visible in the documents but that are part of what make you a good professional writer now and onward into the future.

Your cover letter should be at least 500 words long.

Portfolio design

Document design is a key part of contemporary professional writing, so your Portfolio should showcase your document design knowledge and skills. Design your Portfolio to emphasize your own professionalism and also your concern for the readability of the documents.