Revising for Your Portfolio
I am asking that you revise your paper in a very specific way for your portfolio. Therefore, it's very important that you identify a topic that you can revise according to what I have set out below. So that you'll have a good understanding of the entire process, please read the guidelines for the Unit and the Portfolio Revision carefully. In short, for this unit, I'm asking that you write a source-supported essay, and for your portfolio revision, that you pare it down for some kind of article.
Identify a topic in which you have an interest and one that you believe would be of interest to a larger readership such as that of The Pantagraph, The Vidette, a newspaper from your home town, whether that be The Cassville Democrat (yes, most folks in Cassville, MO are Democrats), the Chicago Tribune, or some similar newspaper. Or you might identify a magazine with which you are familiar and write for that. You will, however, need to have access to 5 of those issues.
Some Particulars:
This unit begins as a source-supported essay wherein you research a topic, write about it, include quotations, provide in-text citations, a works cited page, and so on. Remember, the nature of your research depends on the nature of the topic. For instance, if you want to write about students cheating, you would probably want to look at Time or Newseek for some of the recent scandals, and then interview students and professors on campus. You get the picture.
Audience: Me
Page Length: 5 pages minimum (at least 1600 words), double-spaced (not including your works cited). Include a word count. Your word count will be very important for your portfolio revision.
Use at least 3 different kinds of sources (interviews, newspapers, books, magazines, websites, etc.)
Use as many sources as you need in order to write this paper (you might have 5 interviews, 1 website, 1 magazine). I caution, however, that your website, book, magazine, or newspaper sources should be reliable. That is, don't look to only one website or magazine for your information. Verify your information through other sources.
Understanding Your Eventual Forum and Audience:
Prepare a folder with articles (from the magazine, newspaper, whatever) similar to the article you want to write for your portfolio. Include copies of the articles (a minimum of 5 articles from different issues). If there is nothing similar to
the article you want to write, you will need to justify in writing why the editor should include it.
Write a forum analysis and identify precisely what kind of article it is you want to write. For instance, do you want to write an editorial? A human interest story? A news story? A front page article? An article for the Fashion Section, Parade, or the Home section? Do you want to write a "How To" article for a magazine? Determine how long these articles generally are. Figure out how they refer to their sources. If it is something other than a standard newspaper, describe the audience (for instance, The National Review has a very specific audience as does The Onion). For a "standard" newspaper, try to figure out if the paper is more liberal or conservative, or anything else that might be helpful as you write this. Analyze the articles to discover the type of language they use (casual? formal? somewhere in-between?). Make certain that your topic is suitable for the forum, and determine if it will contribute somehow to a reader's knowledge. If it doesn't, you probably need to reconsider your topic.
Revising for Your Portfolio:
Now that you've written your source-supported essay, you will be revising it for your portfolio and for the forum you chose in this unit.
This will be a bit tricky. Take the word count for your source-supported essay, cut it in half, and that's how long your article will be. It should not deviate 50 words either way. So, if your initial essay were 1600 words, your article will be between 750 and 850 words. Why is this tricky? Well, some topics will require more than 800 words (one double-spaced page equals about 330 words--you do the math). If you were to write a "front page" article, it would probably require more than 800 words. As editor, however, I do reserve the option of asking you to make your final article longer or shorter.
Provide a title for your article, your by-line, and word count. If you want to make it look like column, great. If you want to provide pictures, that's great too.
Make sure that you have found a copy editor you trust to identify typos, gramatical errors, etc. You don't want to turn this in to your page editor with mistakes. This article needs to be as close to print-ready as you can get it.