Writing an essay itself is quite a daunting task for many students. It requires patience, research, thinking, organizing, and whatnot. It gets tougher with an ever-increasing study load owing to highly challenging syllabi in college and university nowadays. Looking at the difficulty of the writing task and lack of adequate time, many students turn to essay writing services for help.
Tips for Writing an Effective Reflective Essay
With an understanding of how difficult it is for many students to write an essay, this article aims at making life easier for them. Here are a few valuable tips to follow if you wish to write excellent essays yourself. Having said this, it is still a lot more convenient and time-efficient to delegate the task to a good essay writing service.
1. Understand the Cue
The key to writing a perfect essay is to understand what the topic is. What does it want you to do? What does the professor expect you to do? Does the question focus on a mere explanation of a given text? Does it expect you to compare and contrast? Does the question ask you to argue out a proposition? Or do you have to reflect and write on an event or a series of events? Your writing task becomes easier if you understand the cue in the question.
The critical thing to know is how to find out what needs to be done. For many of you, it may seem the most challenging aspect of writing; deciphering the prompt. Even professional writers from essay writing services may at times find it quite hard. So, as an amateur, you are not alone. The easiest way to find out what exactly is expected of you is to look for keywords such as ‘explore,’ identity,’ ‘argue,’ ‘compare,’ or ‘reflect.’ Once you clearly understand this part, the rest of it becomes relatively more straightforward.
Once you have fully understood the cue, you will be able to create an interesting topic that will grab the reader’s attention at the onset.
2. Choose an Interesting Topic
Once your understanding of the purpose of the essay becomes clear, the next step is to decide on a topic. A focused topic will introduce your purpose of writing straight away. When you sit down to write a reflective essay, the quickest way to come up with a great topic is to brainstorm, jot down your ideas, relax, go back to your ideas, and focus them down.
Voila! You are all set to write down an attention-grabbing topic that will assist in writing a quick essay in an hour.
3. The Process of Writing a Reflective Essay
What does it entail to write a reflective essay? What challenges will you face? Will the write-up be interesting? These are some of the questions that may take away your sleep. The easy way out is to look for online writing help and relieve yourself of any worries. Yet, if you are daring enough to write one on your own, here is what you need to know about a reflective essay.
A reflective essay connects one or more of your life experiences to the main topic, analyzes it by criticizing how it changed your life and what you have learned from the experience. Diary entries are a great example of reflective writing as you tend to reflect upon the day’s events and write about what you gathered from the event. There are different types of reflective writing depending upon the target readers.
- One of the types focuses on personal growth, where the main purpose is to enable the students/ writers to critically analyze and evaluate their real-life event and understand how that event helped in their personal growth. This inculcates great analytical skills among students. Since they are writing about a real event in their life, it makes them realize their worth.
- The second type focuses on the literature that needs to be analyzed, wherein the students are expected to evaluate a given text and then relate it to their personal experiences.
Whatever type of academic reflective writing you are looking to write, there is a whole reflective process that goes behind it. As a writer, your descriptive skills will be vital in writing a vivid account of your experience. However, it is not merely a story about your personal experience. The important element is to review it and contemplate how it impacted your life. You won’t need any writing help online if you simply answer the following reflective questions and use your answers to write your essay.
- What impact did the experience have on you? Was it positive or negative?
- What did you learn from the experience?
- If you were to have the same experience again, would you act differently? How?
- How have you matured after the event?
Once you have answered these questions, you will be all set to organize your write-up without needing any online help with writing.
4. Organize Your Essay
No matter what kind of essay you are writing, there is a basic format you need to follow if you wish to come up with a well-rounded, coherent, and focused essay. The format includes:
- Introduction: You introduce the main idea of writing in this short section. The purpose of this part is to grab the reader’s attention right at the beginning.
- Body Paragraphs: Usually consists of three paragraphs that explain the main idea further.
- Conclusion: A short paragraph that reinstates the thesis statement from the introductory paragraph and summarizes the main points of the body paragraphs.
5. Check and Proofread
It is inevitable to make mistakes, major or minor, when you are writing something. Once you have completed your write-up, it is important to go back to it, check for grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, punctuation lapses, and even plagiarism. Your essay will lose its value if plagiarism is detected. Therefore, be very careful about it.
6. Important Points to Remember
The trick to writing an effective reflective essay is to understand the main purpose that is to reflect upon a personal experience and how it has shaped your personality. The other important points are
- Understand the cues in your question.
- Brainstorm for ideas
- Think of a relevant and interesting topic
- Organize your essay into paragraphs
- Proofread
Writing a reflective essay has a great therapeutic effect as the writer can relive and review a past event in his life and associate it with the main topic. These tips will surely help you in writing a reflective essay conveniently.
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