Table of Contents
1. Introduction:
Reflective essays are among the most common academic writing tasks students must draft in their academic careers. At first, it seems daunting to draft a perfect reflective essay in one sitting, as writing an essay to describe your personal experiences, thoughts, and idea requires explication of highly polished writing skills. A perfect essay must back on personal experience and delineate how others get guidance from these experiences (it must allow readers to learn from others’ experiences). Using the template, reviewing the assignment brief, and getting instructions from tutors or field experts are some common tips that students can follow before taking a head start. Moreover, several other tips, such as taking help from reflective models, using first persons, including some reflective questions, and depicting extraordinary descriptive and narrative skills, also have a noteworthy effect on the quality of an essay.
2. Tips for writing a perfect reflective essay:
Tips are some pieces of advice or authoritative information usually given to make a process easier for someone. The tips, authoritative information, and experts’ advice are sometimes effective enough to remove all hurdles to smoothen a path to the destination. Concurrently, the following tips are also effective enough to make a writer aware of all the best practices for writing a reflective essay. The foremost thing that ensures excellence in writing is to start writing by getting the purpose, definition and other essentials of writing at your fingertips.
Tip # 1: Know what a reflective essay does demand
As a matter of course, a reflective essay is a literary piece that demands writers to explain a phenomenon or process in the light of personal or lived experience along with a detailed description of its impact. The format of such essays is more or less similar to other essays (introduction, body, and conclusion); however, its tone or writing style varies greatly depending upon the audience and the nature of the experience to be described. The exact structure of essays can only be known by clearing whether a writer is writing for an academic purpose or a magazine/newspaper/website.
Mainly, the introduction is the place to directly or indirectly explain the overall focus of the essay, the body describes how and what an author has learned from experiences, and a conclusion wraps up the reflection often by using a flashback approach to comprehend events and its impact on the author. Thus, knowing these essentials must be the first task an author should do while sitting to draft a reflective essay.
Tip #2: Use reflective cycles or models to follow a stepwise approach:
Using a teacher’s guide, class notes, field experts’ lectures, and a pre-established model or framework is another practical method for writing a reflection in an essay. Since now, there have been roughly more than eight most important reflective cycles, each having certain pros and cons, namely, Gibbs reflective cycle (1988), Kolb reflective cycle (1984), Schon model (1991), Driscoll model (1994), Rolfe et al.’s Framework for Reflexive Learning (2001), Johns’ Model for Structured Reflection (2006), Arkins & Murphy Model (1993), and Brookfield model (2005) (Bolton, 2014). Each model provides a complete framework to reflect effectively on a topic of interest. The use of these models can make your essay writing process easier. (In case you need more information on these models, you can contact the essay help online; their experts can help you understand and explain how to use these models, especially in academic essays).
Tip# 3: Do not be afraid of using the first person in reflective writing tasks:
Using first-person, including I, we, us, mine, our, me, and my, in a reflective essay is advisable, especially when a writer wants to focus on a lived event and lesson learned after passing through it. However, too much use of first-person can give an essay a more informal writing style. Thus, the following phrases and words can help in conserving the formal style of writing even in describing personal events or experiences (with and without the first person):
- Later, it was realized….
- This was because…….
- At that time, I still need to know……
- I am still in search of reasons….
- I wondered what happened if…….
- It was likely due to………..
- After an hour of brainstorming…….
Tip#4: Pick reflective questions:
A reflective essay must answer any three of these reflection questions to seem purposeful. Choosing questions to be addressed in the content of an essay is a good tip and helps the writer be logical throughout the essay. The questions must be somewhat like that:
- What has an author noticed?
- Whether I made a decision based on sentiments or any other factor?
- How did events change an author’s thoughts, perceptions, or life?
- How differently did I act from others?
- Had I experienced such things before, or was it a new experience?
- What skills have I learned from an event?
- Was the event emotionally important or emotionally difficult?
- What was my recreation in the whole scenario?
Tip 5 # Depict excellent descriptive and narrative skills:
For paying attention to the purpose of writing a reflective essay, authors’ well-developed descriptive and narrative skills are essential to reflect on an event in such a manner that people can learn from these experiences. Vague writing, ill-structured essay, and lack of fluency in the provided information may distract readers, ultimately negatively impacting the reader’s understanding and getting a lesson from someone’s experience.
Final thoughts:
In the big picture, reflective essays are important to share personal experiences so others can get advice. Reflective cycles and models are best to outline academic assignments, the use of first-person help know the audience from which events an author has passed through, reflective questions aim to increase the reflective content in your essay, and descriptive or narrative skills allow the audience to exactly know the main events in an essay. Apart from all, if you are still feeling scared about writing such an essay, the easiest way is to seek help from an online essay writer.
