The Complete Guide To Writing A Reflective Essay
Sometimes, students are assigned to write reflective essays. These are academic papers that require you to describe your personal feelings and thoughts related to particular experience. You should also try to educate your readers through your writing about how to behave and how not to behave in particular situations. If you want to know the steps you should take to write this type of paper, look at the list below.
- Select a topic.
- Make an approximate outline.
- Write an introduction.
- Write a body.
- Write a conclusion.
- Edit your draft.
This is a very important stage. The success of your paper highly depends on the chosen topic. Think about the events from your life that changed your world outlook or some phenomena that left a lasting impression on you. The more significant was the experience, the deeper would be your analysis.
Once your topic is chosen, you should make an approximate outline for your reflective essay. This will help you organize your thoughts and present them in a logical and clear order.
In the introduction, you should give a description of the situation that you’ve chosen to be your topic. You shouldn’t include many details because you’ll do this in the following paragraphs. Develop your thesis statement and put it at the end of your introduction paragraph to give your readers an illustration of the contents of your paper.
This is the largest section of your reflective essay. Here you should describe your analysis in details. First, you need to tell about your personal thoughts and feelings that you’ve experienced. Then, you should start analyzing the situation and list its negative and positive sides. The next thing is to tell what lessons you learned and what strengths acquired when being in this situation. Finally, you should write about the actions that you could have done to change the situation for the better.
In the last section of your reflective essay, you should write how this experience affected your future life. You may also indicate how you would behave in the similar situation if it happened once again.
The final stage of your work is proofreading and editing. First of all, it’s important to find and get rid of grammar and spelling mistakes. However, you should also pay attention to the style of your writing. Make sure that your text doesn’t look too personal. You should maintain some formal limitations nevertheless. Another important point is to make sure that you didn’t deviate too far from your thesis statement in the writing process.