Reflective Essay Writing Outlines

A reflective essay is essentially an essay designed to emulate past experiences or occurrences in writing form. Most reflective essays are to show the reader changes and evolutions of yourself or certain aspects about yourself, so there is a constant change of tenses during the essay between past and present. During this essay I will be describing the most important parts of writing a reflective essay and all the key elements that should be included.

At the start of the semester I struggle using the APA format and it showed in my essays.

Throughout my life, my mom has always told me to create an outline as a way to organize my thoughts. Although I do outline before every paper, sometimes I find it difficult. Coming up with all of my ideas I want to focus on can be stressful especially when it is a difficult topic. Possibly instead of always outlining I would be interested in grouping my notes. This is one strategy that is mentioned in this book. As a student that enjoys making note cards, this could possibly be more effective. It allows you to make different piles and separate your notecards accordingly. This is definitely a way to gather my ideas in a more organized manner. Another negative challenge to my writing is the beginning of my writing process. Although I might have my outline all written out, I struggle with starting out my essay. I would not consider myself an academic writer, so sometimes I have to really think about sentences for a long period of time before writing them down. I believe creating an essay blueprint will be a good way to assemble parts of an essay. Figure 10 in the book is a good example of a blueprint. It is a different type of outline, however, could provide assistance during the essay process. There would be a chart and each paragraph would have its own

Before I start to write a research paper, I do research and collect all available information about that subject. I take notes, bring all available data together, and analyze them. Whenever I feel ready, I start writing. I can describe my framework better, and organize writing easily with this strategy. So, I feel more comfortable when I write.

My first semester as a college student has been a roller coaster. In English Composition Ⅰ, I wrote many papers; some stood out more than others. The papers I am most proud of are “One House, A Million Things”, “Not Another Family”, and “Starbucks or Starsucks?”. Throughout the course of the semester, I have learned new ways to express my thoughts on a new level. The basics of my writing process has stayed the same, but I have learned new techniques. I always have a topic in mind first, then I normally just start babbling on and on about the topic. This semester we learned to ‘rip the roo’; in other words erase the entire thing and restart. I do not have to completely rip the roo every single time, but ripping part of the roo has become a huge part of my process. I will erase a section here or there to make the flow work better. Once I have my rough draft where I want it, I go back and fine tune the paper to make sure all aspects are where they need to be.

The moment I started this course, the class is taught to freewrite,map ideas, and outline our essay. These methods have been the most helpful strategy ever I could have been taught. After, being able to draught down all my ideas down in an organized outline I was prepared and had all my ideas together. Unlike, other times my ideas have always been all over an essay because some ideas would fly by and be forgotten which would take me more time to write a paper then the usual. I learned that in writing it is always very important to have some type of organization, so it leads the reader with a clear understanding of the overall theme. From here on I will always take the time to organize my writing because this method has helped me gain clear writing

I think an outline is a very good idea. I remember using an outline in high school and it made the process a lot easier. The ideas and evidence are all in your outline you just got to put it together into your essay. This outline is kind of like a check list making sure you expressed all ideas and evidence into your essay.

Starting an essay with outline is highly important. An outline has helped me stay organized and It also helped my essay make sense. When it came to

Before the essay is written, I like to now, due to this class, use an outline. This is much more effective then my past method, which consist mostly of writing all of my information in bullets, and linking them all to a few main ideas. The outline allows me to organize my thoughts in an orderly fashion and this reflects through my paper because it is also orderly. For

My drafting process was unusual, in order to correct myself I read again and again what i wrote already until I knew what part and how to fix my grammar and the concepts that I could use to replace the existing ones, sometimes when it was too difficult to understand an error I would write it down on a piece of paper and then find a way to paraphrase it by adding some clarity and justification to my writing. While editing I mainly used the notes written on the first drafts that i submitted and also by reading some parts of it to my peers to get some feedback and to know if my sentence structure is correct.

My classmates provided me with many great recommendations in order to improve my resume. To be honest, I felt like my resume was poorly constructed because it was the first time that I created one in my life. I knew that I had a lot to learn, and so I was open to hearing any criticism from my peers. They provided me with a lot of recommendations, most of which I agreed with. One of my peers recommended that I need to look up some of the resume templates online in order to find one that looks more professional.

As the quarter continued to go ahead, I learned about several ways to organize the main points of the essay.. In most of my earlier writings I had difficulties with organizing my thoughts and writing them down in a cohesive way. For instance, in one of my writings about Social Networking, in my outline; I planned to talk about the 2 negative effects of social networking and 1 positive effect however, the order of combining my thoughts did not match the thesis statement I planned to write. After writing the second draft, I learned how to layout my thoughts effectively before writing the essay. Firstly, I would introduce the 3 main ideas in the outline, then

Writing for me has always been a difficult and daunting task. I always found myself asking, “Why is this required?” “How is this helping me and preparing me for my future?” “What’s the point?” However, at the completion of my writing 122 course I have come to realize how important writing is for my future. Writing is way more complex than I ever thought of it to be. I have had to ditch my old high school habits and establish new techniques that have made writing much more enjoyable and less stressful. Some may think that taking a writing course is not necessary for your future and shouldn’t be considered a “requirement” to graduate. You go through your whole life needing writing skills. No matter what profession. You will learn so many great life skills that will not only help you through this course, but the rest of your college career and life. I went into this course with little confidence in my writing ability, but that gave me motivation and a feeling of purpose for being in this course. Writing should be considered as more than just a requirement due to the fact that it is found in everyday life. The skills you learn in a college level course, such as how to properly go about doing research and annotating articles, will make writing feel less like a dreadful assignment.

Going into Writing 20, I could best describe my writing as alright if you don’t look at it too closely. Grammar mechanics have always been an issue. I have a hard time transferring my ideas from my mind to the paper in a way that is easily decipherable to a reader. Writing 20 has helped develop my ability to, if not fix my editing skills, at least get them to a place where my voice can shine through.

This course has helped me excel in my writing technics. I have learned many skills that will help me in future college writing assignments. The course goal enabled me to focus on what was important for writing a successful essay. Some of the skills I learned are writing for different audiences and genres, using evidence critically to support arguments, composing in multiple forms of media, and using appropriate writing processes both individuals and collaterally. As I have reached many of parts of these goals I do have a few areas that I could still improve upon, one being critically reading and interpreting evidence.