We strongly encourage you to spend some time revising the writing samples in your portfolio. There are several reasons for this:

  • Most students include at least one piece from early in their college career (e.g. an essay from your A&I or your first term at Carleton). Ideally, your writing skills will improve over your first two years, so these early pieces might not accurately represent your current abilities.
  • Faculty grade essays based on the standards and goals of their individual courses. This means, for example, that you might get a high grade on an assignment that called for a thesis-driven argument, even if your thesis and structure weren’t particularly strong. However, the portfolio only assesses your writing skills, so the same essay might not satisfy your portfolio readers unless you revised the thesis and structure a bit to better express your argument.
  • Similarly, an instructor may not require students to use formal citations or clearly document their sources, especially on short assignments that only require students to use assigned readings from that course. Your portfolio readers, on the other hand, will expect you to clearly document all of your sources. This means that you may need to go back and add citations, even if the original assignment didn’t require them.

Getting Help with Your Revisions

The best place to start is by carefully reviewing any feedback you received from your instructor when you submitted the piece in class. Don’t just look at the grades you received; seriously consider any points your instructor makes about the strengths and weaknesses of that piece.

If you’re not sure whether or not to revise the pieces in your portfolio, or don’t know how to get started, the associates at the Writing Center can help you! Critically examining your old writing can be hard, but the Writing Associates are trained to help you find concrete ways to improve your writing specifically for the portfolio.

Documenting Your Revisions

When you submit your portfolio, you’ll fill out a Moodle Quiz that will ask for some basic information about each piece you include, including the term and course where you originally wrote it and the portfolio requirements it’s meant to fulfill. This quiz will also ask you if you revised each piece specifically for the portfolio. 

It’s important to understand that this question isn’t an academic honesty test. We’re not asking you to promise that the pieces in your portfolio are or aren’t identical to the versions you submitted in class. Rather, we’re asking you to tell your readers how to approach each piece. Does a given piece represent your writing skills at the time you wrote it? Or does it represent your abilities now, at the time you’re submitting your portfolio? Your writing will still need to fulfill the portfolio requirements either way, but it’s helpful for readers to understand what stage in your academic career each piece represents.

This means that you shouldn’t say that a piece was revised for the portfolio if you only made superficial proofreading changes, such as correcting typos or adding punctuation. That’s editing, not revising. 

However, if you make significant revisions (e.g. changing the thesis or your topic sentences, adding citations where there were none, adding or significantly altering paragraphs, etc.) then you should indicate that the piece was revised for the portfolio, so your readers know that this is a better version than the one you originally submitted to your instructor in class.