Professional Reflective Essay: Writing Guide

Reflective essay writing is an integral part of the educational process for every student. It is a task aimed at checking the knowledge of students at the end of the course. Usually, this essay is based on the information learned during classes, and students are supposed to integrate the received information in their papers.

However, in the process of reflective essay writing, knowledge of class materials is not the only thing that matters. Proper organization of the paper, its structure, and format are also essential elements of the writing process. The following article will help you find out more about reflective essay writing.

Definition of Reflective Essay?

In order to know how to write a reflective essay, it is important to understand what kind of paper it is. So, generally, reflective essay can be defined as the essay about your personal experience. It provides information on some specific period of your life and your thoughts about it. It is not always necessary that reflective essay is about class materials only. Your professor may ask you to reflect on your feelings, memories, etc. However, in order to make the audience interested in information of such type, you have to be creative and innovative.

Even though it may seem very easy to talk about yourself, it differs in practice. You may remember some events but in order to make them interesting for the readers, more details have to be provided, which may be difficult to remind.

Starting Your Reflective Essay

In order to provide a high-quality piece of writing, each writer should start his/her work from preparation. In case of reflective essay, such preparation entails outline writing. The difficulty of writing about your personal experience is that you have what to say and you try to provide as much information as possible. As a result, you may end up writing a paper that lacks logic and order. Outline will help you concentrate on the most important aspects.

The other things that should be paid attention to include:

Paper Structure

Reflective essay traditionally consists of Introduction, Main Body, and Conclusion.

Introduction

Effective introduction has to be short, informative, and interesting. It has to provide information on what is going to be described in the paper and concentrate on main ideas of an essay.

Thesis

Thesis is a statement of your main intention. It should do the following:

1. Describe something (event, person, etc.);
2. Provide example;
3. Explain the importance of the event for you.

Conclusion

This part is used to summarize the information presented in the main body. In order to make your conclusion effective, you should:

1. Highlight the main points of the story;
2. Provide logical conclusion.

By following the above-provided structure, you will be able to write a reflective paper of high quality. Remember that preparation is the first step to successful completion of your work. Do not ignore the stage of outline writing to make your reflective essay logical and properly structured.