Academic Writing: Categories
Writing a Reflexive Essay: Sharing Your Experience
Pretty often students feel confusion when they get the task of writing a reflexive essay. There are two reasons for that confusion: similarity of terms “writing a reflexive essay” and “writing a reflective essay”; the absence of any ideas about what this kind of paper should be written about. But you should not worry in any case.
First of all it should be made clear that writing a reflexive essay and writing a reflective essay are the notions that can be interchangeable. Anyway, when writing a reflexive essay your task is to present your own experience.
So, at this stage of writing a reflexive essay the second problem stands: what experience to write about? Usually students are asked to write about an event that changed their lives greatly, about a person who is an authority for them and whom they respect most of all, or about a careless action which they regret about now. The range of topics for writing a reflexive essay is wide. But sometimes you cannot accomplish the task because you did not experience anything like that. What to do then?
Do not worry. There is always a way out. For instance, you can imagine the situation you are asked to describe, and produce writing a reflexive essay on that imaginary situation. If you do not have a great experience you can give the example from your academic life or of some difficult situations in college and the way you managed to cope with them.
In any case your teacher will assess your writing a reflexive essay properly, if you present not only the chronological list of the events of your life and their short description, but the analysis of your experience, your arguments about why you consider it to be important and what lesson you was taught by this experience.
If you want your writing a reflexive essay to be appreciated at its true value, you should remember about one important thing: when writing a reflexive essay it should contain not only the details of your own life and experience. So, do not forget to evaluate all that experienced things you write about and writing a reflexive essay will become a pleasure for you!