Why Reflection is Important

Over the semester, and especially at the beginning, I found that reflection on my own work is an essential aspect of personal and professional growth. I initially found it hard and even pointless sometimes to reflect on my own work because I am a college student and I have many classes to manage, and reflection at the beginning of a semester did not seem important. However, I learned that reflection provides an opportunity to analyze your strengths and weaknesses, identify areas for improvement, and ultimately learn from past experiences, and apply that knowledge to your future work. This reflection was specifically important because the partner essay introduced many new challenges and nuances to writing. The process of working with multiple people, each with their own ideas and input, proved to be challenging. However, these challenges can be overcome through effective communication and compromise. Reflecting on this experience allowed me to identify areas where I was good and had sufficient skills, but working with other even more so revealed the areas that I was poor at. I'm grateful that my peers were able to provide feedback to me and help me improve my writing. Additionally, reflecting on the final product of the Partner Essay was so interesting because I (and I imagine other readers) could see the difference in tones, diction, and other writing techniques from the different writers, but all of it contributed to building the same argument. This analysis can help you identify your strengths in synthesizing information and your areas of growth in integrating multiple perspectives. Ultimately, I've found that reflecting on my work, especially in this case, contributed to me improving on my writing throughout the semester, and I will continue to use this reflection thinking to improve myself in many ways.