Reflective Writing

Topic 1: Your Vision for Future Writing, Reading, and Research Success

Throughout this course, your classmates have provided you with feedback on your writing and you have been evaluated multiple times on your assignment submissions. Now, it is time to evaluate yourself as a writer and create a plan for continued writing, reading, and research success.

I. INITIAL POST: After reviewing your Unit 1 Discussion Board and retaking your Hawkes Personal Writing Assessment Tool (just once-please do not complete multiple times to try to improve your score):

Describe what you see as your greatest success in achieving your writing, reading, and research goals in the past 10 weeks.

Identify the area of writing, reading and research in which you feel you have seen the most progress and improvement.

Explain which assignment you have completed in this course that best demonstrates the achievement of your course goals.

Include a brief Vision Board that shows where you think you will be in 5 years as a writer, reader, and researcher and what you need to do between now and then to realize your future vision of yourself. Feel free to be creative. You can simply write out a brief plan, or if you feel adventurous and want to try out a different skill, post a PowerPoint slide, or a short Prezi clip, for example, that demonstrates your vision.

Develop ideas in at least two paragraphs and at least 200 words.

Include an open-ended question about the draft you have written, perhaps about a concern you have about how to continue to improve the skills you have developed in this class

Refer to and credits the Unit Lab and PG resources concepts to help validate your ideas about writing and to give you practice with using and crediting sources.

In the following Reading, you can expand your knowledge of reflective writing in the classroom and self-assessment in the workplace.

Reflecting On Your Experience

Over the past ten weeks, you have learned an amazing amount of information and have written multiple assignments, each aimed at giving you practice that will help you to succeed in communicating in personal, academic, and professional situations. Once this course ends, though, your journey is not over. Writing improvement requires constant effort and self-reflection. To continue to strengthen your skills, continue to read good writers and learn from them. Continue to apply the writing strategies you have learned in this course. And continue to reflect on your skills, your strengths, and your writing weaknesses. Learn from these strengths and weaknesses and who works to solve writing problems and who communicates ideas effectively to others. The power of your words can bring about change. The following Reading will help you to learn how to reflect upon and evaluate your strengths and weaknesses so you can continue on your journey of writing success.

Reflective Writing

Reflective writing occurs when you analyze and write about what you have learned or experienced through an interaction of some sort, an event, or an observation. It could also be your analysis of a passing thought or emotion. Reflective writing can give you insight and help you internalize the information you are learning and reflecting upon.

Reflective writing can be both personal and academic. You can conduct reflective writing in a journal at night to look back on the day’s events. You might sometimes ask yourself what you could have done differently during the day or how you could have handled a situation better. This personal reflection can help you grow because you are learning through your reflection.

You can also use reflective writing as a learning tool to go over what you have read and then examine what you have learned from it. After reading a chapter in a book, you can briefly analyze what you learned; thus, you internalize the information. Also, after taking a class, you can write a reflective essay on the material that was covered and how it will apply to your future career.

The biggest pitfall of reflective writing is to simply describe what happened. It is important to remember that you need to discuss what you learned from the experience, be it personal or academic.

The most important thing you need to remember before you attempt reflective writing is to make sure you fully understand the material you are reflecting upon. If you are confused or unsure what the material meant, you need to go back and reread it until you fully grasp the subject. It is extremely difficult to give your thoughts on a topic that you do not understand.

When you start your reflection, you can ask yourself some or all of the following questions, depending on what you are writing about:

1. What information will I reflect on?

2. Why is this information important to me?

3. What did I find interesting?

4. What was uninteresting?

5. What was the author trying to say?

6. What are the conclusions that I came to after reading it?

7. Will I be affected by what I learned? In what ways?

8. Would I have changed anything?

These questions will help you dig deep into the material, which allows you to examine different aspects of it.

In reflective academic writing, you most likely will refer to outside sources for support. Sources can be used to strengthen your personal observations and reflections. When writing your reflective essay, you want to make sure to draw back to the information, and do not focus on just your opinions or feelings. You need to use specific and convincing examples to support your claims. You want to make insightful connections.

Don’t forget that reflective writing is still academic writing in the classroom. Grammar and spelling is important. Careful proofreading should be done, multiple times if possible.

Also, make sure to use varied sentence structure, be aware of your audience and purpose and use an appropriate tone. You should also demonstrate control of topic specific terms and language.