Reflective Writing

Reflective Writing

Writing reflectively involves looking at your writing from different perspectives. You are looking back on your writing from the beginning of the course with the experience and knowledge you (hopefully) gained over the semester. It helps you gain insights that are needed to transfer what you’ve learned to new situations, academically, personally, or professionally.

This process of reflecting will ask you to think about how you think. This is called metacognition—specifically in this class to be aware of how you go about thinking about your writing process so that you can evaluate your writing and revise it with new insights.

For this class, I am asking you to do both single reflections and a comprehensive reflection.

A single reflection is like the exploratory paper you did—more conversational and narrative. For this course, your single reflections will be about the writing assignments you had. You will write about each one, the process involved in writing them and your thoughts about it—what worked, what didn’t. Your goal is to give depth on the assignments—specific ideas concerning how you approached the assignment and ultimately wrote the final copy.

For your in-class essay written on the last day of class, you will be writing single reflections for your portfolio to introduce the essays. I have given you questions on the Portfolio Guidelines handout, but you may also refer to p. 721 in Chapter 27. The questions to answer fall under four categories:

Process questions: what specific writing strategies did you use to complete the paper?

Subject-related questions: How did the subject of my paper cause me to “wallow in complexity”?

Rhetoric-related questions: How did the audience I imagined influence me in writing this paper?

Self-assessment questions: What are the most significant strengths and weaknesses in the essays?

For your in-class essay, you will also be writing a comprehensive reflection. This will be to show the development as a writer over the semester. In comprehensive reflections, you need to demonstrate four kinds of knowledge:

Self-knowledge: an understanding of how you are developing as a writer

Content Knowledge: what you have learned by writing about your topic—insights gained from researching and opening your mind, challenging your beliefs by listening to other’s points of views.

Rhetorical Knowledge: your awareness of the decisions you made concerning your purpose, audience and what strategies you used to make effective arguments.

Critical Knowledge: your awareness of strengths and weaknesses in your writing

Reflection on Class Discussion

What were your thoughts on the topic before reading the articles?
After having read the articles, what thoughts came to mind? Did you form an opinion right away?
What did you already know about this topic?
What were some of the things that were said that affected you somehow, even if only slightly?
Did you hear points of view that you didn’t consider before? If yes, what were they?
Did you begin to care more about the subject once you listened and/or participated in the discussion?
Did your point of view change after having listened/participated in the discussion? How?
How did you feel while the discussion was taking place?
Did you have thoughts that weren’t expressed either by you or by anyone else?
Were there thoughts expressed that confused you or didn’t make sense to you?
What about this setting made the discussion go in the direction it went? Would another setting have brought about different ideas, even if it were the same group discussing it?
What about this group made the discussion what it was? Think about gender (also how many men and women), ages, backgrounds that you are aware of in the group.
What were some of the best (strongest) points brought up?
What were some of the weakest points brought up?
Please add any additional thoughts you have on the discussion that may not have been addressed by the previous questions.