Reflective Essay

What is a Reflective Essay?

This kind of essay reflects personal experience of the writer. The major condition of it is to be a description of a concrete personal experience, which the writer perceived by himself. The writer has to reveal this experience in the paper and to show its importance for understanding social relations and the essence of human communication and interaction. This type of paper usually reflects a kind of philosophical analysis based on various experiences of everyday life. Reflective essay gives students a possibility to demonstrate their creativity and ability to turn a common perception into an original one and indicate their own unique attitude to social issues.

How to Write This Type of Paper

Writing a quality and outstanding reflective essay requires specific skills. One should remember that reflective means having a personal character and relating it to certain philosophic categories. It assumes having numerous possible ways to assess the topic of the essay. For instance, one of the common topics for this type of papers is “What is love?”, in which the writer has to share his or her thoughts and ideas about this notion through the prism of his or her own experience and express personal attitude to this phenomenon. Most issues in such papers are rhetoric.

How to Create an Outline for Reflective Essay?

An outline is a kind of a short summary. It is a brief description of main points and facts, presented in the analyzed work and put in simple words. An ability to create good outlines for any types of papers requires great practice.
Writing an outline usually consists of several steps:

• Determining the main purpose of the essay.
• Creating a list of principal points.
• Organizing these points into a structure, which makes sense.
• Adding several sub-points for each category.
• Reviewing and adjusting the outline.

Reflective Essay Structure

As a rule, reflective essays have no certain structure, as they cannot be written in accordance with the standard essay structure. This is because the main statements and conclusions of such type of papers are mostly indistinct.

Here is one of schemes you may choose to use for writing a reflective essay:

• The introductory paragraph should catch reader’s attention and get him/her involved in the writer’s story. This means, that this part of the essay has to include personal experiences and interesting details. The style ought to be very bright and appeal to the reader’s emotions as if it was a private conversation on a delicate or philosophical topic.
• The body part of an essay has to reveal various writer’s thoughts on the chosen topic.
• The concluding paragraph includes a brief summary of the major ideas of the paper. Here, the writer usually provides his or her attitude and overall perception of the topic.

Reflective Essays Topics

Reflective essays can be written on various topics, based on the reflection of personal experiences of the writer. One of the major points that help to create a good reflective essay is a full understanding of the chosen issue.

If you cannot decide which topic to select, do not hesitate to contact us and get help from our best essay writers.

Reflective Essay Format

Like other kinds of essays, a reflective essay can be formatted in APA, MLA, AMA or Chicago/Turabian style, depending on the assignment requirements and essay topic. The writer has to be consistent following certain academic style in all the elements of the paper: title, headings, spacing, citations, page numbers, reference list etc.

Reflective Essay Samples

We have numerous reflective essay examples in our database. You can download any essay sample from our custom writing company for free.