Reflective Essay

Reflective Essay Guidelines

Format: MLA, APA, or CMS

Length: 750-1000 words

Due Dates:

  • Sun Dec 9, 11 pm. Submit with final portfolio.

Requirements

Your reflection essay needs to explain how you've developed as a writer and become more aware of your strengths and weaknesses. You can describe your knowledge and comfort with writing at the beginning of the semester, compared to now. It's also acceptable to compare what you learned in this class to prior writing courses or ideas you had.

The essay needs to devote a significant amount of attention (400-500 words) describing the feedback you received on your writing and how you made revisions. Be specific. Identify key pieces of feedback regarding your thesis statements, introductions and conclusions, organization, and/or use of evidence. You don't need to discuss all of these elements. Pick the most important ones. Likewise, you don't need to discuss all three major projects. If you spent a lot of time on 1-2 projects, then discuss those.

If you didn't need to revise your essays as much, then focus on explaining what you did up front in order to produce such strong work. Identify strategies and habits you already knew how to use, and how they helped you succeed. For example, maybe you completed multiple drafts before submitting to your instructor for a grade.

You should reference key concepts from the course objectives and WPA Outcomes Statement 3.0. You don’t need to specifically mention the WPA statement by name, but you need to demonstrate a vocabulary for discussing writing.

For example:

  • rhetorical knowledge (audience, thesis statements, claims, evidence)
  • genre awareness (academic essays, newspaper articles, documentaries, PSAs, etc)
  • conventions (style, grammar, formatting, citation)
  • process (brainstorming, outlining, revision, peer review)
  • critical thinking (inquiry, debate, analysis, multiple perspectives)
  • information literacy (source types and evaluation, library database use, search tools)
  • electronic literacy (website construction, use of hyperlinks, Adobe Programs, etc)
  • modality (visual, textual, aural)