The Key Elements Of A Reflective Essay: A Basic Manual

One of the main types of essay forms that you may be asked to do in school is the reflective essay. The idea behind writing a reflective essay is to analyze something that has previously occurred. This can be an event that you attended or an experience. There are some basic elements that this type of paper includes. In order for you to be effective, you will need to include these elements.

  1. Organized account
  2. You need to allow your reader to experience the event. Therefore, it is important to make sure that you organize your ideas to ensure that you tell them the series of events in a chronological order. You can accomplish this by making an outline. This outline will ensure that you talk about the events in the right order so that it makes sense.

  3. Personal point of view
  4. This paper is about how you felt during the event, how you saw things, and how you felt. It is a personal account of the event. It is a reflective essay and therefore, you need to reflect or look back at it and express your personal point of view. You wouldn’t want to use “you”. This paper should use “I”. It should talk about the things that affected you and not what affected anyone else.

  5. Personal experience
  6. The paper will be an account of your experience and not that of someone else so the information that you give should relate to you and not to another person. You don’t have to tell who won the award that night but rather how you felt when they gave that person the award. If ten people wrote about the same event, all ten would be different because each one had a different experience.

  7. Details, details, details
  8. You have to include a lot of details. This is the part that will make your paper a success. The reader needs to know how things looked, how it smelled, and what it felt like. The more details that are used, the better the paper will be. You need to paint a picture with your words so that whoever is reading it can really “see” what was going on. If you can add a lot of detail to your piece, it will make it easier for your reader to be able to use their imagination to picture what happened.

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