Guide to Writing a Reflective Essay
When asked to write a reflective essay, you should be interested in understanding the objectives of writing this type of assignment first. This is the place to begin before writing anything. Ask yourself, “What am I required to write about?” This is an important question that will guide you into successful reflective essay writing. So, what is a reflective essay? Continue reading to find out more about this important assignment that you are required to do.
In reflective essay writing, the objective here is a focus on an experience or event. As the name suggests, you will be doing a thorough analysis of that experience and the lessons that we can learn from it. You are required to do a reflection of something. The approach to take here is looking at a past event and analyzing it using the present happenings.
Approach to writing a reflective essay
Essays are distinct because they are of different types. In that case, you should always make an effort to study your particular assignment and pick the best approach to it. When writing a reflective essay, you should remember it is about writing your emotions and thoughts concerning a specific experience or event. The overall objective is to paint a good picture of the personality, individual traits and history around the event.
Put in place a good and clear summary and a description of the experience for the reader to experience it too. This should be your goal. The more you can do that, the better you become at writing a reflective essay. Your feelings, reactions and thoughts are all that is needed to create impact through your writing. Here are important things to remember.
- Identify your event or the experience to reflect on. What is this one event that you feel knowledgeable enough to share your thoughts and feelings with your audience? A typical example could be reflecting on WWII and the state of affairs globally during that time. What triggered it? Was it necessary? Could it have been averted? What are your thoughts on the happenings of the time? These are the questions that should be running through your mind.
- Prepare an outline for your essay. Pick important highlights of your topic to write about. List down key items that you believe will be important in building this particular essay. Let there be an introduction, the body and conclusion.
- Introduce the topic. Background information to your topic is useful before doing the actual analysis. Therefore, it will be a lot helpful to bring your audience to a proper understanding of your topic.
- Discuss your thoughts. Once an introduction and background information has been provided, you can share your ideas and thoughts on the topic.
Final Thoughts
A reflective essay is as good as you can understand the topic and share your thoughts with your audience. Highlight key aspects of the topic before analyzing the same to bring your audience to an understanding of how you feel about the topic.