In this component of the portfolio, you’ll write a response to the topic proposal your slightly younger self wrote at the beginning of the semester. Now that your research project for the semester has been completed, you’re probably in a very different rhetorical orientation toward the topic than you were initially. That situation puts you in the perfect position to offer some feedback to younger you about the topic, your research questions, how you’ve tackled them, and so on.
Put another way: If you had the chance to time travel to a few months ago, what would you tell yourself? What recommendations would you make to change the proposal (if at all) and why? How might you help your younger self accomplish their goals more fully or effectively? Are there new questions you find yourself more interested in now that you might want to suggest to your younger self? Are there any alternative decisions you might recommend to your reader?
● Audience: Yourself from the beginning of the semester.
● Length: 3-5 pages (~900-1500 words). This response does not have to be comprehensive, but
it is meant as an opportunity to engage a colleague (in this case, your younger self). Make use of the document length to focus on the most important elements or concerns you want to address in your response.
● Format: A paragraph-based essay or report.
● Organization: Unlike your initial topic proposal, which required including some
introductory/background context to help your reader for that document understand what you’d be discussing, this response to the topic proposal can focus more immediately and exclusively on the issues that you want to raise about the proposal. (After all, the younger you demonstrated their understanding of the topic as part of the proposal!)
As a result, you can organize your argument based on what you feel might be most useful to that younger self.
● Do you want to emphasize the most important or urgent recommendations you want to make to your reader?
● Do you want to identify a series of new or updated research questions you’d want to pursue instead and explain the rationale for including each?
● Do you want to respond “chronologically” to the claims you made in the topic proposal (moving from the first page through to the last, in order)?
Whatever the case, you’ll want to make sure that the organization is recognizable and follows a trajectory from beginning to end that can aid your reader in investigating these new lines of inquiry, or considering new issues/complications you’ve identified, in order to accomplish an even more successful version of the project you’ve just completed.
