Guide To Writing A Reflection Paper

A reflection paper refers to the type of assignment that demands you express your opinion on a specific matter. They usually have an academic tone, are personal, and subjective as well. With this kind of assignment, you need to analyze and reflect upon how different experiences, events, and/or resources shaped your thinking and attitude towards a particular subject.

In this article, we aim at providing you with a functional guide that you can use when writing your reflection paper.

Introduction to reflection paper

A reflection paper is a type of assignment that needs you to elaborate on your opinion concerning a certain topic with support based on personal experience, examples, and/or observations. As opposed to emphasizing on literature review, reflection papers allow you to present your point of view—and the good thing is that every answer is correct.

Being a personal endeavor, you are tasked with writing in such a way that your readers will find it much easier to understand what you are trying to say. You have a huge array of topics to choose from and you can write about almost anything.

Types of reflection papers

There are three general types of the reflection paper.

  • The educational reflective paper where you give feedback about a book, movie, or seminar you attended in the form of an informative review
  • The professional reflective paper that is written by people who study or work in either an educational or a psychological institution and could include behavioral topics
  • The personal type, which explores your feelings and thoughts about a personal subject

Format for reflection papers

Reflection papers often don’t have a specific format or style guideline to follow. Since it is your opinion, educators usually entrust the formatting to you. You decide on your path to follow and structure to build on. This way you don’t have any guideline constraints to conform to and you are free to be creative in your approach. As a rule of thumb, most reflection paper assignments or essays have a word limit requirement of 800 words maximum.

Where to start

Just like any other research paper assignment, you will have to start by carefully investigating and reading through the material that needs to be reflected upon, highlight main concepts for your paper, and note down key points and ideas.

When you are ready to commence writing the reflection paper, you can immediately compose a summary of all the noted ideas. Once finished with the summary, read it through to make sure that you captured all main concepts from your notes.

If everything sounds good, you can then weigh if it would be helpful to include lists, tables, charts, and graphs for presentation purposes and to enhance the delivery of information and your ideas. However, there is a need for observing moderation when using these visualization elements or else the paper might appear too busy and sometimes messy.

Finally, read your paper again and brainstorm through its general outline to make sure that it flows seamlessly and that it is organized appropriately.

Simple Ideas