An Expert Guide to Writing a Reflective Essay
Reflective essays often stand out from other essay assignments, as they are drastically different from the rest, especially in terms of the structure and language. In a reflective essay, the writer presents their personal reflection on a chosen topic, which includes their personal experiences, beliefs, perceptions and inferences. This type of papers follows a first personal writing style, where the writer uses pronouns like I, My, Myself, etc. Now that you know what a reflective essay is, let us now get down to how you should write it.
How to Write a Reflective Essay
Start with the Introduction
A reflective essay begins with an introduction. Here you introduce the topic that you are going to discuss in the rest of the paper. The idea here is to familiarize the readers with the subject, by providing some background information. Since, you are going to present your personal account or experience, so providing some background information will help the readers to get a better context of what you are trying to communicate.
The Main Body
Following the introduction, comes the main body of your essay. This is the section where you present your main discussion. The main body can be broken down in to different sections, which segregates into your experience, evaluation of the experience, analysis, and action plan. According to the experts of EduHelpHub, the exploration of personal experience can be done using the Gibb’s Reflective Cycle.
The Gibb’s cycle consists of stages like Description, Feelings, Evaluation, Analysis, Conclusion and Action Plan. The Description covers the detailed account of your experience or collection of information. The Feelings represents what you feel and think about the said experience. Next comes the Evaluation of the experience, to determine its impact in terms of good or bad. This is followed by the Analysis of the situation in order to make sense of it. After that you present your Conclusion, where you note down what you have learnt from your experience. Finally, you are required to present an Action plan. The Action plan covers a detailed planning of how you will use the gathered information to better deal with identical situation in the future.
The experts from ManagementPaper would agree that while writing your reflective essay, it is always recommended to follow the Gibb’s model. It gives you a clear idea about how you should proceed with your paper. One of the most common misconceptions about reflective writing is that the author does not need to use reference citations, as it is their own experience. But, as a matter of fact, referencing plays an important part of personal reflection, especially in the Analysis section. The Analysis section asks you to analyze the experience to make sense of the situation. In this section, the best practice indicates that you should refer and relate your experiences with existing theories and literatures.
For example, if you are discussing about a particular incident that involves the behavior of the customers then, you are likely to refer to consumer behavior theories like AIDA, to relate your own experiences. In simple words, when you are analyzing your experience to make sense of the situation, then it is always advised to relate it with a theory. It makes your analysis more legitimate and will help you get better grades.
The action plan of you reflective writing also plays a vital role. Any expert from PenMyPaper would agree that any learning is incomplete without the application of the findings. So, in the action plan you are required to present your planning on how you are going to apply what you have learnt from your experience. Following the Gibb’s reflective model will definitely improve your reflective essay.
Final Words
In your reflective essay, you must maintain a proper flow from one section to another. The reader must not feel out of place when they arrive at a new section. Your referencing should be accurate and must cite the right literatures that relate to your experience. Make sure that you are not overusing the first-person pronouns, as it can degrade your language. In the analysis section you should provide a reference relating to your experience, right after you have highlighted them. Just follow these tips and you will nail your reflective essay any time.