Aug 17, 2020
How To Write A Reflective Essay
When being tasked with writing a reflective essay for the first time within their lives, students often don’t feel confident enough they are able to write an excellent piece. But all you need to provide a convincing reflective essay is to use some helpful tips from the professional writers of our essay writing service. Listed here is everything you need to understand about writing an impressive reflective essay.
What Is a Reflective Essay?
A reflective essay is a kind of written assignment where the writer analyzes the function from days gone by using a present point of view. The goal of a reflective essay would be to demonstrate the result of days gone by event — specifically, so what can be learned from the function and the way the event helped shape the personality of the individual writing the paper.
Description vs. Reflection
You might say, a descriptive essay is somewhat just like a reflective essay. Both refer to a conference from the writer’s past and both can be equally rewarding for the writer, allowing them to relive the event inside their thoughts and perchance even acquire some closure.
Nevertheless , there is one key big difference between a descriptive essay and a reflective essay is that the purpose of a descriptive essay is to simply describe a past event without providing an in-depth look on the effect of the event on the writer’s personality and present life.
You should use rich language and various literary devices to spell it out the event, but a descriptive essay hardly requires the writer to accomplish any analysis at all. A reflective essay also describes a past event in great detail, but its main purpose would be to express the results of the function and how they changed the writer’s life and outlook.
What to Focus on When Writing a Reflective Essay?
The main topic of a reflective essay could be nearly whatever influenced your daily life in a significant way. Typically the most popular thing to spotlight when writing a reflective essay is really a past experience — whatever occurred for you some time before. It can be a meeting or conversation with somebody that left a lasting impression you.
Other potential subjects of a reflective essay include:
- Places or objects that had a significant influence on your life and personality;
- People you have met who changed your lifetime in any way;
- Major experiences with books, movies, and artwork;
- Life-altering events that made you different as a person;
- An example of your personal growth;
- Your thoughts or products of your imagination.
Structuring a Reflective Essay
Similar to other types of written assignments, a reflective essay features a clearly defined structure you need to follow if you prefer your essay to have the right impact on your readers. A normal reflective essay will include these paragraphs.
Introduction
If you should be no stranger to writing various essays, you are already familiar with this part. The task of a reflective essay introduction is always to prepare the readers for what they've been about to learn in your paper.
From your own introduction, they ought to find out why exactly the event in the essay was so impactful for your life and personality. Most importantly, the introduction should really be interesting enough to convince the audience to carry on reading.
Body
The human body of your reflective essay is both the longest and the absolute most vital element of your paper. In this chapter, you may take your readers on a journey through the events of the past and how they contributed to your personality and life.
There is absolutely no strict structure to follow in the torso of a reflective essay, but it’s very important to check out a logical flow of the narrative. Most reflective essay authors prefer to adopt the chronological order, that allows you to spell it out and think about the events in a way that will soon be easily comprehended by the readers.
The reflection itself
The important part of the essay is the part where you reflect on the big event in question. Here you will need to list the reasons why the big event proved to be so impactful. After each and every reason, you may expand about it and analyze the effect this kind of aspect of the big event had for you in general.
This can be a reflective essay, which means you can let your ideas run wild without being conformed to an obligatory solution to describe the consequences of the function. You can even put in a little speculation to make your writing more captivating to the readers.
In the torso of your reflective essay paragraph, you need to place a special concentrate on the lessons you learned from the function. These lessons will not continually be pleasant to create about or depict your personality in the best way, however they are necessary for demonstrating your growth.
Returning to the situation
While summarizing the big event is not the most crucial part of a reflective essay, this the main paper is important for allowing the readers to understand where you were originating from. Again, you may be as step-by-step as you would like here, nevertheless the description of the past events certainly shouldn’t be longer than the reflection part of your essay.
Understanding the context
If the events from your past took place years or even decades ago, or if the context of the events was very unusual and various from the items we experience every day, the readers could have trouble understanding the background of the story.
In this the main body of one's reflective essay, you are to supply an insight into what your life was like during the time and what social, economic, and cultural background might have impacted how a events unfolded and their effect on your lifetime.
Modifying future outcomes
The events that happened for you and the impact that they had on your personal life story cannot be changed. However , it is possible to give way to your imagination and predict the different outcomes for the story which could have taken invest a different reality.
In this area of the essay, you can even reflect on everything you could have done differently in the situation you're in. You can even fantasize concerning the possible upshot of the events had individuals in your life acted differently or the context of the story changed.
Conclusion
The main thing about writing a conclusion for your reflective essay is that you don’t have to offer any new information to your readers. Alternatively, you need to conclude everything that has been said in the last parts of the paper and finish the essay with one strong statement that may stimulate the readers to accomplish some additional thinking after reading your reflective essay.
Questions to Ask When Writing Your Reflective Essay
Even although you don’t need certainly to include any actual questions in your reflective essay, asking yourself those questions and answering them in your head or in your drafts will allow you to craft an even more concise and convincing story. Here are 10 questions to answer should you want to write a powerful reflective essay:
- Why exactly was this event so impactful to me?
- How did I react to the big event back when it simply happened?
- How did my attitude towards the event change with time?
- Will there be anything I possibly could have done differently back then?
- Would I like an opportunity to change any such thing about the event?
- How did the function impact me in the short and long term?
- Was the event more positive than negative or vice versa?
- What did I learn from the event?
- Can the event and my reflection on it help other people?
- What would I say to anyone going through the same event today?
Final Tips From Our Writing Team
Once you clearly know very well what you’re doing, writing a reflective essay is as easy as any academic assignment. If you follow our recommendations, you are fully guaranteed to write an excellent reflective essay with minimal commitment. Still can’t complete the assignment? Let our college essay writing service assist you to write the strongest reflective essay of one's career!
