Writing Portfolios
About the Creative Writing Portfolio
Introduction
A creative writing portfolio is an authentic form of assessment to measure a student writer’s maturity of thought and literary style. In developing the portfolio, the student writer is encouraged to be self-directed in his/her learning.
A good creative writing portfolio is a meaningful collection of the student writer’s works, reflecting fluency and flexibility in the crafting of ideas, originality of insight, thoughtfulness in the elaboration of ideas and self-reflection, and sensitivity to the world at large.
What makes a Portfolio?
For our purposes of selection, a portfolio of works by a young student writer should be a thoughtful collection of works that exhibit the student’s effort, progress and achievement in chosen areas of literary interest.
The content must be chosen by the student himself/herself with the help of a teacher-adviser.
The choice of sequence and sections that make up the portfolio should be purposeful. In certain cases, these could be self-explanatory e.g. pieces which are thematically organised.
It would be good for the student to state the rationale for his/her selection and include self-reflection. For example:
“I have chosen these pieces as they reflect my flexibility in adopting different personas to offer diverse perspectives on this issue.”
“These pieces were my attempt to “Show and not tell”. I have deliberately done away with explicit narration and used dialogue and non-verbal gestures to reveal the thoughts and feelings of the characters.”The number of pieces to be included is not as important as the representative nature of the collection.
Criteria for Selection of Participants
Participants will be selected based on the strengths of the portfolios in the following criteria:
Sense of form
Precision with Language
Truthfulness of Feelings
Originality of Thought & Imagination
Sensitivity to the World at Large
The rubric for assessing the CAP Creative Writing Portfolio can be found here.