The Best Way To Start A Reflective Essay: A Writing Guide

The purpose of a reflective essay assignment is to get the student to compose their thoughts and express them in writing so that the eventual reader will be able to gauge your understanding of the subject matter being taught in class.

That may sound like a good objective, but when faced with the task of writing this essay, many students do not know where to start and will struggle with the assignment. Here is a quick guide to getting the writing underway.

Choose a topic

If the topic or subject matter was not provided then the first step to getting the writing completed is to select a topic. The topic should be something you enjoy as this will make the entire process much quicker and you will have more subject matter and expressive material to draw from.

Brainstorm ideas

The next step to develop a reflective piece is to brainstorm ideas and get them down on paper or screen. This process is a free form process that allows you to identify key points that you will include in the final piece.

Outline the work

Once you have a set of ideas you can begin to put structure to your reflective thoughts and develop an outline for the work. The outline will guide you through the writing process and allow you to complete the work more quickly.

Fill in the body of the piece

The next step is the composition step of the writing process. Begin filling in the substance of the essay following the outline as a guide and you will soon have the first draft of the writing.

Introduction and conclusion

When writing this type of piece it can be easier to write the introductory and closing paragraphs after you have written the body of the work. This will allow you to introduce and conclude key points more thoroughly and avoid unnecessary rewriting.

Edit and proofread

The final step to any piece of writing is to go back through and edit the piece for any grammatical or spelling errors. The best piece of work can be marred by using poor grammar or by having an incorrectly spelled word. Do not rely just on the spell check function of your software, go back through and reread the piece to ensure that all wording is correct.

No matter what the topic of your reflective essay happens to be, if you follow these steps you will have a top quality piece in no time.