The Reflection Paper (new essay or letter of 800 words minimum-see below)
This essay is a personal essay in which you reflect on your growth in this class through the semester.
You may also want to discuss goals for what comes next.
The Reflection Essay (or Letter)
To bring this semester to a close, you will reflect on your experiences, assess your growth as a writer and reader, evaluate your strengths and weaknesses, connect these things to your needs for future success, and evaluate your learning in the class. This is a personal essay (or letter) about your writing and learning. Here are a few questions that may help you in creating this reflection:
What aspects of your work do you think were most effective? Why? How so?
What aspects of your work do think were least effective? Why? How so?
What specific action(s) would improve your performance based on the feedback you received?
What did you learn from working on the various course assignmentsabout the content, topic, process, and/or yourself?
What related goals do you have for yourself after this semester ends?
Reflection paper requirements:
Reflection essay word count requirement: 800 +
You can choose to write either an academic essay or a letter to your instructor
Start general and make your focus clear
Use clear main idea statements for each paragraph.
Organize each body paragraph around one key idea (stated in the topic sentence).
Support your main ideas. Develop the ideas. Provide discussion about the ideas.
Cite evidence from your prior work, instructor feedback, our class documents, etc.
Include at least 2 quotations in this essay (from prior writing which you will include in the portfolio). Remember the portfolio requires 2 pieces of prior writing. Use in-text citation (see below).
Have a logical conclusion paragraph.
No Works Cited doc needed.
Referencing Prior Work
A key element of the portfolio is including your previous work. What you include in your reflection paper should be included in the portfolio. You can choose what to include (prior essays, letters, discussion posts, feedback), but the minimum is two prior essays.
How do I reference my work in the reflection paper?
One way to discuss your writing in the reflection paper is to focus on revisions you’ve made to show your growth as a writer and editor. You can point out what you’ve learned about your own skills, your own needs as a learner, your achievements, your future goals, etc.
Decide what to include in the portfolio (You don’t have a lot of choice in this class, but in most situations, portfolios are about this decision of what to include.) Typically, you want writings that showcase your strengths and hard work as well as your struggles and lessons learned, even if not yet reflected in the grade.
Include the graded versions/drafts as well as a revised version of the work to show your progression/improvement/edits. Make sure you highlight or use Comments in Collaborations to indicate these changes.
Another way to discuss your writing is to focus on patterns of strengths and weaknesses. Are there common strengths and errors across different writing assignments? Look at your writing and grading comments to find similarities across the essays.
Main idea statements; development/details/support; organization; citation; sandwiching/flow
Language: sentence structure/verbs/punctuation/word choice/word forms/collocations
Develop your Reflection Essay
Include quotations from your previous writings. Decide where to include references to your writing. You may want to mention errors and/or how you have fixed common errors. You may want to include what you did really well, such as an example of a well-written thesis.
Create the portfolio. Put the work together as a whole. See Presentation of Portfolio below for how to do this.
Citing your own writing
First, this is NOT a research paper. However, you are required to cite your own previous writing.
Second, you will only use in-text citations for this essay. Since you will be citing multiple works by the same author (YOU), you should use the title of the work in your in-text citation (see Section 56a #10 in Rules for Writers ebook). Therefore, make sure that the writing assignments included in the portfolio each have a title. If you didn’t give your writing titles, do that when revising them. Get creative. Maybe the title is “The Irrelevance of Time” or “A Quick Review.”
To cite your own writing, you will use the title in your in-text citation and a quotation. For example, if I want to cite my second Short Write or second essay, it might look like this in the paragraph:
Beginning sandwich…In my second essay, “The Irrelevance of Time,” I said, “lkjdflkajsdkfjdsk.” End sandwich…
Notice that you can use first person since this essay is about your writing and learning.
NO WORKS CITED needed for this essay!
