A writing portfolio provides material to use in evaluating not only students' finished products but also their persistence in developing and revising to a finished draft. Typically, portfolios contain the assignment sheet, brainstorming exercises, essay plan/outline, and first through final drafts of all writing. A table of contents sheet, listing everything that should be in the portfolio, helps students organize them. Portfolios may be checked and graded weekly against the table of contents sheet for completeness, organization, and neatness. This is not time-consuming when a check grading system is used, and helps students be better organized and more responsible for their writing. Students learn through the portfolio that writing is evolutionary and that good pre-writing is the foundation of good writing. Portfolios reveal the number of drafts students write, thus indicating the level of their willingness to learn. The portfolio provides the teacher with valuable evidence, including patterns of errors, in all stages of the process or product, and provides students with concrete evidence of their progress. Students learn to assess their own writing by doing a mid-term and an end-of-semester critique of an essay written the first day of class. They name the writing skills they have learned, and demonstrate their use of them with examples from more recent work in their portfolios. (SR)