Draft Catchy Reflective Essays In Four Easy Steps

Reflective essays papers are personal and subjective pieces of documents that constitute a critical examination of your life’s experiences. Colleges and universities assign reflective essay writing tasks quite often to find out more information about their students. These type of writing tasks provide a solid training to sharpen your critical thinking skills, your ability to express opinions on a particular matter and needless to say, polish your writing skills as well. You will need to open up about your thoughts and emotions to paint a vivid picture of your personality and individual traits.  

In a reflective essay, a student generally examines his/her experiences in life or shares his/her thoughts and emotions about a particular event or phenomenon. If you have been assigned a reflective essay in your university, you must explore how you have changed, developed or grown from those experiences. A reflective paper will have its specifics. You will have to maintain a formal academic tone and carefully monitor the content, format and style of language as you proceed with the essay.

How To Write A Reflection Paper

Follow these steps to draft stellar reflective essay and score the topmost grades in class.

• Sketch an outline

Try to make a mind map before you proceed with your write up. Write down the experience you want to share and draw a circle around it. Then identify the central focus of your argument and the ideas that will support it and connect them to your central circle. This type of flow diagrams will help you to see the overall structure of the essay at a glance and in turn, let you decide on the logical sequence of the paragraphs and order them appropriately.

• Draft a clear and concise introduction

The introduction of your reflective essay should be short and straightforward. Don’t go into elaborate description or analysis of an event just yet. Mention the background of the experience you are about to discuss in a nutshell and leave the rest of the information for the body paragraphs.

• Include detailed information

Deeply think about what you want to discuss and compose an in-depth write up about how the experience affected you. Do not merely glaze over the issue without specifically stating the exact progression of events and your personal analysis of the same. You can also add visual and auditory associations or include quotes from books and articles that impressed you the most.

• Talk about your achievements

A reflective essay paper should not only be a cluster of your emotions but concentrate on your experiences and talk about the new skills you have acquired as well. The best reflective essays generally start with an introduction where students talk about their expectations before they read a particular book or attended a lecture that moved them to a great extent. Then in the next section follows the emotions and feelings that they had after they engaged in that particular experience. And finally, the essay focuses on why and how that experience contributed to shaping their personality.

Use descriptive language in your essay to grasp the professors interested from the beginning till the very end. You can conclude the essay with a rhetorical question to your readers about how they would have reacted in a similar situation.