8 Basic Ingredients Of A Good Reflective Essay

What is a reflective essay? It’s your speech about an event in your life, your own experience of a certain kind that has changed you, your habits, your world outlook in general. Sometimes such projects are devoted to a kind of experience students receive in the process of studying and the way this experience influenced their life. Yet, whatever your topic is, you need to remember 8 main ingredients of a winning work.

1. Understand your topic.

Before you start writing, sit for a while with your topic in front of you and check out, which thoughts come to your mind. If you are asked to speak about your personal experience of a certain kind, call to life all the emotions and memories that are connected to this event.

2. Put down main ideas.

Give a quick summary of your experience in several sentences that are rather descriptive and personal. However, you should not forget that, being somewhat like your own personal diary, the reflective essay is an academic paper. Keep the academic style of writing, avoiding colloquialism in your narration.

3. Tame your imagination.

Though speaking about personal experience is quite easy, you should keep your paper rather short. Depending on what is required, count words in your essay in order to make it precisely of the demanded length. That is, an average good reflective paper is between 300 and 700 words.

4. Speak about your experience.

Introduce the experience you are speaking about with expectations you had before it happened. Then, keep on moving towards the point where you will explain how your expectations were or weren’t met. End with a phrase that presupposes the conclusion of the entire paper.

5. Feel comfortable.

Your essay is your life. If you feel uncomfortable about revealing personal details, avid speaking about them. Your essay will not lose anything if you omit awkward moments.

6. Avoid involving personalities.

If you are speaking about a person who was involved in your experience in negative way, evaluate this person’s actions, not their personality in order to avoid rudeness. Show your readers that the actions were negative because of their influence on your experience, not because you simply did not like them.

7. Avoid empty sentences.

Try avoiding wordy sentences with no particular meaning. Keep being clear and precise, and stick to your topic through the paper.

8. Give it a check.

After you’ve finished, check your whole paper and double-check it some time later with a fresh eye to correct all the mistakes.