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Work Sample & Commentary:  Interview With the Vet
The task
As an applied learning project students on an English/history team decided to design and publish a series of magazines organized around historical themes. The magazines were then distributed to middle school students who could not afford to buy magazines of this kind. The article here was one of many produced by the students that were subsequently published.

Circumstances of performance
This sample of student work was produced under the following conditions:
alone in a group
in class as homework
with teacher feedback with peer feedback
timed opportunity for revision

Although a single student took the responsibility for this particular article, the decisions as to topics, as well as the compilation of written articles into magazines, were handled by the class as a whole.

The error in the transition from page one to page two occurred during the process of setting up the page layout.

What the work shows
a Writing: The student produces a report that:
• engages the reader by establishing a context, creating a persona, and otherwise developing reader interest;
• develops a controlling idea that conveys a perspective on the subject;
• creates an organizing structure appropriate to purpose, audience, and context;
• includes appropriate facts and details;
• excludes extraneous and inappropriate information;
• uses a range of appropriate strategies, such as providing facts and details, describing or analyzing the subject, narrating a relevant anecdote, comparing and contrasting, naming, and explaining benefits or limitations;
• provides a sense of closure to the writing.
This work sample illustrates a standard-setting performance for the following part of the standards:
a Writing: Produce a report.
The reader’s interest is engaged by a brief story that introduces the subject of the article.
The article makes a transition from the opening story that took place in Vietnam to the present day interview that identifies the controlling idea for the article: a soldier remembering what war was like.

The structure of the article replicates the organizing structure often found in human interest articles in newspapers and magazines. The structure is appropriate here considering that the article is written within this genre.

The student stayed within the genre of a human interest article throughout, focusing on what the war was like primarily through the eyes of the article’s subject, as opposed to dealing with the war in broad generalizations. As a result, the information included was appropriate.

The article includes a number of strategies appropriate to this genre. For example, the article begins with an engaging anecdote before moving on to less interesting facts and details, allowing those details to gain significance for the reader.
A sense of closure is produced by ending on an uplifting note appropriate for human interest articles.