Reflective Essays: Definition, Types, Skills, and Strategies, Summaries of Technical English

Download Reflective Essays: Definition, Types, Skills, and Strategies and more Summaries Technical English in PDF only on Docsity! 2/3/2016 1 Writing a reflection essay Definition A reflective essay is a description of a personal experience that explores the significance of that experience. a "crucial process in the transforming of experience into knowledge, skills and attitudes" (Robertson, 2005) a key step in both life-long learning and the development of professionalism in practice. (Novack et al., 1997) Types of reflective essays There are various types of reflective writing or essays including Autobiographies, Letters Memoirs All these gives the reader an idea about the writer’s life experience and actions Skills of reflective essays There several skills that can be obtained from sharing experiences through reflective essays in health including: Observation active listening ability to tell the patient’s story Verghese A. The physician as storyteller. Ann Intern Med 2001;135:1012-7. Basics of a good reflective essay A good reflective essay should: • be written in the first person that includes your thoughts and feelings • describe an important experience in your life or in the life of someone you admire, interested in • use figurative language (more details in the figure of speech power point), dialogue, sensory details, or other techniques to re-create the experience for the reader • explain the significance of the event • make an observation about life based on the experience • encourage readers to think about the significance of the experience in light of their own lives Strategies for good reflective writing  When writing a reflective essay the best strategy include:  Planning and prewriting  Drafting  Reviewing/revising  Proofreading and editing your final work.  Lets look closely at each one. 2/3/2016 2 Prewriting Finding ideas for your essay What experience do you want to focus on, look to previous memorable events, pictures, people that will help jog your memory List people who have inspire you or inspired you, what did they do to earn that inspiration Write down some events, incidents, notes, conversations about the person/s, what makes them special or not Planning Your experiences – why do you remember that particular experience or experiences better than the others, what emotions did it elicit during the time it was happening, was there any change in your feelings, emotions The significance – what is the significance or point of that experience, what did it mean to you (the most obvious meaning), remember it could have several meanings Scope of the essay – will you write about one example or event or experience in depth or will you focus on many events that happened to create the impression you want? Final message to convey – how will you encourage the reader to understand your work and apply the meaning to their own lives Drafting  Start writing – you can start entering your story as if you were entering your ideas in a journal, and depending on the expectation for the reflection paper you will deal or address the issues that need to be addressed as you go along  Organizing the essay – start the paper with writing your own experience first and then you can edit to include the significance of the essay, or what the lessons learnt were or you could do vice versa, first the lesson’s learnt and then in depth entry into the experiences that led to that lesson learnt  Elaborating on ideas – after the draft is written you can revisit it to include figure of speech, that will help with conveying the message you want taken, you should revisit the essay after a certain time to get a better idea for what is missing or needs inclusion The basic story Start Middle End Thoughts and feelings Details and description Conversations/dialogue Reflection Example table to help plan your paper Revising, Editing and Proofreading Review for clichés – you don’t want it to express ideas that have been overused, they may not relay the message you want Edit your work – If this is going to be the final draft, edit it to fit the need to the essay (is it an assignment, or submission elsewhere etc – grading rubric usually looks for structure, content, expression and technical accuracy) Proofreading – this is critical, you may want someone else to review it for you, having a second set of eyes read your work helps see errors in technical accuracy such as sentence structures, grammar and spelling Examples of reflective phrases  Looking back…  On reflection…  With hindsight..  In retrospect…  Nowadays I feel/think/believe…  If I could do this again...  If this happened now…  I learned…  I realise...  I understand…  I should have…  I could have...  I wish I had…  Because of this I am…  Since this happened I…  When I think back on this…  Thinking about it now I feel…  At the time I . . . but now I  It was a . . . thing to do because…  I could have...  I wish this had never happened because…  Now that I’ve been through this…  I grew through this experience because…  This made me think about...  This experience shaped me by…  I’m glad this happened because...