How to Write a Reflective Essay: Format, Tips and 5 Examples

A reflective essay is not so much a conventional college essay as it is. In fact, a piece of writing that allows you to explore a particular experience in your life and then come up with meaningful conclusions based on that experience. The main point here is that this writing assignment is designed to make you think and analyze what you think about something.

What Is a Reflective Essay?

A reflective essay is a unique form of essay that aims to observe, examine, and describe an individual or personal experience that the author has had. When writing such an essay, you need to keep in mind that the focus is on your deeper, inner emotions rather than the event. The key is to make your essay reflective, and the key to achieving that is to put your personality into it.

Below we will explain how to write reflective essays, various formats, the purposes, and the importance of a reflective essay, and provide useful tips to make the writing process easier.

What Is the Purpose of Reflective Writing

  • Unlike essays that you’ve been writing for class, this essay is meant to be a reflection of yourself. It’s meant to reveal something about you that isn’t already obvious.
  • Reflective writing also helps you learn from a particular practical experience. It will help you connect what you are taught in theory and what you need to do in practice.
  • Reflective writing encourages you to observe your life experiences and beliefs – for instance, your own past experiences as a learner or your observations from teaching rounds – and link these with the theoretical learning in your subject. This can help you develop and reinforce knowledge about theories, gain a greater understanding of particular concepts, and reflect critically on the practical realities of specific situations and the theoretical knowledge that informs your understanding of them.
  • To improve your critical thinking skills,
  • To think about the past events more objectively,
  • To gain new knowledge about an event or similar situation,
  • To learn from your past experiences,
  • To become aware of your strengths and weaknesses.

What Do I Write About?

It is the question that every student must ask before writing a reflective article. Here is a list of reflection questions and ideas to help you get started:

  • A time you felt lost.
  • A time your beliefs were challenged.
  • The moment you overcame a fear.
  • A moment in your life you would like to relive.
  • Ways you think you or people can make the world a better place.
  • The most difficult choice you had to make.
  • An introspective look at your choices or a time you made the wrong choice.
  • The happiest moment, or most frightening moment, of your life so far.
  • An experience you will never forget.
  • A time something changed your life.

Reflective Essays Format

A reflective essay format is not very different from other essays, such as argumentative or expository essays. The basic difference between them lies in that it is written about one’s personal experiences.

Here is the format:

Introduction

Main Body Paragraphs

  • Supporting details
  • Background information

Conclusion

  • Summarize the main essay
  • Restate the thesis statement

You might also be required to arrange your essay using the APA style or the MLA format. If asked to format your paper in MLA or APA styles, apply these shortcuts:

Reflective Essay in APA Style

  • Insert page number on the right;
  • Times New Roman 12 pt font double spaced;
  • Your reflective essay should be divided into four parts: Title Page, Abstract, Main Body paragraphs, and References.
  • Include a page header on the top of every page;
  • 1” margins;

Reflective Essay in MLA Format

  • The header should include your name, your professor’s name, course number, and the date (dd/mm/yy);
  • 1” margins;
  • Titles are centered;
  • The top right includes the last name and page number on every page;
  • Times New Roman 12 pt font double spaced;
  • The last page includes Works Cited.

How to Write a Reflective Essay?

Writing a reflective essay is not persuasive writing, where you have to convince your readers to accept your opinion. You have to share an experience. However, writing such essays can be challenging for students as it requires them to use high-level thinking skills. To make it easier for you, here is a guide on how to write a reflective essay:

Choose a Good Topic

The first step is to choose a topic that is meaningful or important to you. Think about things that have happened recently in your life or experiences you’ve had. Consider situations or events that inspired you made you emotional, or changed your outlook on life. You could even think about something that happened to someone else and how it impacted them (or even yourself) somehow. For example, if your friend was unable to physically exercise for several weeks due to a broken leg, you might reflect on how this impacted them emotionally, socially, and academically.

Research your Topic

After choosing your topic, start by doing some research on it. If you chose a moment in time, try to figure out what caused the event or memory and what the outcome was. If there was some conflict or issue that arose because of this event, try to see why it happened and what lessons you learned. Take notes while conducting your research so that you don’t forget any details or facts when writing the body paragraphs of your essay.

Create a chart or table to keep track of all your information

To ensure that you haven’t missed anything, we recommend creating a chart or table to keep track of all your information. This will help you organize your thoughts and keep them on the right track for an effective essay.

Recognize your Experience

It would help if you thought about writing a reflective essay as an opportunity to look back on what you’ve done and how it affected you. Take some time to think about your experiences and how they impacted you before jumping into the writing process.

This can be done by thinking about what happened on that particular day, what it was like when it happened, how you felt, and anything else that may have occurred.

Ask Yourself Some Questions

The next important thing you need to do is ask yourself some reflection questions. For example, did something happen that day? What made you feel the way you did? If it was something that didn’t make you feel good, what did you do about it? What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? How could someone else benefit from what you learned in this difficult situation?

Organize the Essay

A great reflective essay should be between 300 and 700 words long, like many other essays. If you find yourself exceeding that number of words, take a look at your reflection paper outline and see if there are any areas where you can cut down on words or omit them entirely. This can often mean removing some of the less important facts about your experience or the experience of others. Following this guideline will help ensure that your paper does not feel too short or wordy.

Follow the Best Reflective Essay Structure

First, write an introductory paragraph that grabs your reader’s attention and lets them know what they’re getting into. Then comes the essay’s body: three or four paragraphs that talk about the main arguments or position (depending on whether or not you’re writing an argumentative paper). Each paragraph should have one main point, written clearly at the end in a topic sentence, so your reader knows where you’re headed next. Then wrap up everything you’ve said by writing a conclusion.

Revise your Reflective Paper

One of the key points of your reflection paper is revising it. The first step to a well-written reflective essay is to read through your essay more than once. This might be time-consuming, but it is worth it. That’s because you will have a chance to review the ideas you’ve expressed in the paper and make sure that they are relevant and logical. Also, revising your paper allows you to correct any grammatical or spelling mistakes and add some new information you might have missed while writing the first draft.

Reflective Essay Outline

Don’t know how to write a great reflective essay outline? Here’s how:

Introduction

The introduction is where you introduce your topic, state the purpose of your paper, and give any background information that the reader needs to understand the rest of the essay. This is where you tell the reader why they should care about what you’re writing about, so make it count! You can also use this space to provide context for your topic—you might want to give a short history lesson here or explain why it’s important to understand this topic. There should also be a thesis statement, which is one sentence that describes the overall point of your essay.

The introduction of your reflective essay should start with a hook statement — an attention-grabbing statement that sets the tone for your entire piece. You can do this in a variety of ways, such as:

  • Sharing an anecdote that relates to the topic at hand
  • Asking a question for readers to answer
  • Giving a fact about the subject, you will be discussing in your essay

You can move on to give a little background and context on the topic, leading up to the thesis statement, which is what you want readers to walk away thinking about.

Body Paragraphs

You will build each body paragraph around an idea or event related to the topic of your reflective essay. Under each idea or event, you will want to write about how it impacted you and changed your life (or at least thinking) somehow. This is where you may need to reexamine and reflect upon instances in your life that have led to changes in how you think about your subject.

Include three main points in your body paragraphs—these will become the topic sentences for each that relates to the thesis statement, followed by evidence supporting that idea. Each body paragraph should have three sentences: one sentence stating what the paragraph is about, one sentence explaining why this is important in your larger thesis statement, and a final sentence that sums up what you said in this paragraph.

Conclusion

Write a concluding paragraph that wraps up what you’ve said in the body paragraphs and leaves the reader with something new to

In the last paragraph of your essay, tell the reader why they should care about what you’ve written. What is its purpose? Hopefully, this will make them think more deeply about their lives and how they interact with other people around them.

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