How to write a reflective essay?

When we talk about writing a reflective or reaction essay, people often consider them the same as that of writing any other genre of essay but in reality a reaction essay is quite different. First of all, this genre of essay should never be confused with that of informative essay since both of them are different.

The former requires stating your own experiences and presenting your own perspective while writing the later genre of essay entails that you do an extensive sort of research on a topic assigned or chosen by you. Instructors often ask their students to write a reflection essay after watching some sort of a documentary. Students of sociology and other social sciences should always be prepared for writing such essays.

Know the word limit

Another worth mentioning point about the reflective essay is that instructors usually keep a very low word limit for these as compared with other genre of essays like argumentative or informative essay. The reason for this low word limit is simple and straightforward. You are required to state your own perspective and students often digress when assigned such task. So, how should you go about writing a reflective essay?

Do not forget to do brainstorming

The very first thing you need to do is brainstorm. If you have taken some notes regarding your topic then now would be a good point to open them and take help from them while doing brainstorming. Students often get worried about the organization and structure of the essay while brainstorming without considering the fact that the whole point of brainstorming is to generate ideas and organize them later.

Once you have sufficient ideas on your paper, now is the time to prepare a proper thesis for your reflective essay. After you have decided on that, now you need to prepare a basic outline of your essay. More specifically, you will want to decide what key points to include in successive paragraphs.

Prepare an outline

Preparing an outline certainly makes things a lot easier in terms of not only organization but also in the preparation of thesis statements of different paragraphs of your essay. It would be a good idea to prepare the outline of your essay in accordance with the format or structure of reflective essay.