Take a moment to see how reflection might work. First, read the following short essay.
Schools should do more to help returning, non-traditional, and working students succeed.
Many students struggle to succeed in college for reasons outside of their control. They don't struggle because they're not intelligent or driven. They struggle because they have to balance school responsibilities with life duties. They may work full time, care for their families, and still have to spend their scant free time in classes. This can present a real challenge.
One thing schools could do is offer more online, evening, or weekend classes. These kinds of classes are easier to fit into busy schedules. Professors could make deadlines more flexible to allow students to better manage their timing. Classes could offer more resources online so that students can access support at odd hours and from wherever they happen to be.
All of these changes will benefit many students. They will be particularly useful for the most busy and overworked students. By implementing such policies, colleges could make earning a degree more plausible.
Now read this short reflection on that essay, and consider what insights the author has gained about the process.
This was an easy topic for me to write about because I have a personal connection to the issues. So when I sat down to do prewriting, all kinds of ideas came out. I used a clustering method to make connections between those ideas, which helped as I was connecting the same ideas in the paragraphs later. I noticed when I was rereading that the paragraphs jump from one idea to the next kind of quickly, so I think I could probably spend more time writing transitions. Overall, my sentences are pretty short and I don't always connect ideas, even when I could. So I'll work on that more next time.
You can see here that the author has gained new perspective on both the writing process and the finished project. As the author says, making connections between ideas during the early phase of brainstorming helped her connect more clearly the eventual paragraphs that those ideas would become.
This was an easy topic for me to write about because I have a personal connection to the issues. So when I sat down to do prewriting, all kinds of ideas came out. I used a clustering method to make connections between those ideas, which helped as I was connecting the same ideas in the paragraphs later. I noticed when I was rereading that the paragraphs jump from one idea to the next kind of quickly, so I think I could probably spend more time writing transitions. Overall, my sentences are pretty short and I don't always connect ideas, even when I could. So I'll work on that more next time.
This is a skill that she might want to replicate in her next assignment. You can also see that the author knows that she struggles with sentence variety and tends to write in short, choppy prose.
This was an easy topic for me to write about because I have a personal connection to the issues. So when I sat down to do prewriting, all kinds of ideas came out. I used a clustering method to make connections between those ideas, which helped as I was connecting the same ideas in the paragraphs later. I noticed when I was rereading that the paragraphs jump from one idea to the next kind of quickly, so I think I could probably spend more time writing transitions. Overall, my sentences are pretty short and I don't always connect ideas, even when I could. So I'll work on that more next time.
She now knows that she wants to devote more energy to that element of her writing in her next project. All told, this reflection has given the author the opportunity to reassess her feelings about not just the product itself, but the whole process of writing. Knowing what she knows now, this author is ready to tackle her next assignment even more successfully.