In my previous blog post, I wrote about a reflective essay assignment for a first-semester English Composition class. The assignment asks students to explain how a personal object symbolizes them. Students often write a about a valuable object such as their laptop, cell phone, or pickup truck, or they write about an emotionally-meaningful object such as their grandmother’s jewelry or a childhood toy.
In this blog post, I want to describe another reflective essay assignment, where students reflect on an experience. The specific assignment prompt is to “write a reflection on a personal experience that also incorporates a theme from one of the assigned readings.”
As with the previous assignment, the goal of the essay is to articulate a thesis statement about the experience (to identify a “controlling idea” or “dominant impression” or “lesson learned” about the event) and to create unique paragraphs that organize the discussion. Each paragraph is supposed to start with a claim about the significance/lesson of the event and also to provide some discussion to explain the claim.
Additionally, during this unit, students read several reflective essays and personal memoirs, and students are asked to interact with the ideas of the reading. These reading assignments often focus on the themes of gender, race, education, family, growing up, and other interesting topics. Students may interact with the reading assignment by agreeing with it, disagreeing with it, questioning it, problematizing it, etc. As they interact with the text, they also start to incorporate documentation strategies, including “speaker tags,” in-text citations, and a reference page / bibliography.
Theoretical Background
This assignment is often called a “narrative essay,” but I like to use the term “reflection” (based on Axelrod and Cooper’s textbook “Concise Guide to Writing”) because a “narrative” suggests a retelling of events in chronological order, and it makes students think they have to write a short story with characters, action, and dialog. In contrast, a “reflection” is a traditional expository (explanatory) essay where the content is based on personal experiences and ideas. This essay format also helps establish the style of writing for the rest of the semester; students will be writing explanations rather than creative stories.
Otherwise, I don’t really have a specific literary or rhetorical theory for this writing assignment. In general, it’s very common to begin writing classes with personal writing assignments – mostly because students have pre-existing content (their own experiences and beliefs) that they don’t need to research or discover, though they may need to engage in pre-writing and brainstorming activities to articulate it.
Memoirs, creative autobiographies, op-eds, essays (in the style of Montaigne and 19th-century English essayists) are among the most common form of writing, and, in the recent digital era, this form of writing is very common in blogs, social media posts, podcasts, and video blogs (“vlogs”).
Writers have an experience, reflect on it, and identify broader conclusions or lessons that can be relevant for other readers. In doing so, they also comment on broader ideas, philosophies, cultural beliefs and practices, legislation, and many other things. Honestly, I believe that probably all writing begins in this way – even if the “experience” is only an act of reading or an imaginative event. (There is probably an allusion here to Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility.”)
Approaches and Examples
This essay is usually a simple five-paragraph essay. In the introduction, students briefly describe a personal experience or an important event in their life, then they present a thesis statement that interprets the event, creates a “dominant impression,” provides a broader “lesson,” or provides another “controlling idea.” Often the controlling idea is about the event itself (for example, “my summer camp was a life-defining religious experience”) or it may be a broader statement about a similar event in general (for example, “summer camps can provide life-altering religious experiences”).
However, this essay form does not go into the realm of advocacy or argumentation (for example, a student would not argue that “summer camps should be financially supported”). This type of writing would be more appropriate for the position paper or argumentation unit.
Next, the first body paragraph usually provides a more detailed explanation of what happened. This paragraph reads more like literary fiction; students include characters/people, settings, events in chronological order, dialog, and often a surprising plot twist. This paragraph helps explain what happened or what the event is, and the specific language use also helps create the dominant impression. It’s important that the narrative be kept short (half a page or two-thirds of a page at most); otherwise, if the narrative takes up several paragraphs, it takes over the essay, and the essay becomes more of a narrative (or a creative autobiography) than an expository reflection essay.
In the next one or two paragraphs, students draw conclusions about the experience or event. These paragraphs explain what the event means to the student or what it shows about them, or they describe “lessons learned.” As with the previous Symbolism Essay, students could explain the experience/event in several ways.
The experience could have emotional meaning. For example, a family vacation may elicit feelings of love and family and togetherness, or it could represent an opportunity for relaxation and adventure. For example, one student wrote about how a “girl trip” after her high school graduation represented the beginning of her adult life. It was the first vacation she took with her friends and without any parents, and it was probably going to the be last time all the girls got together. The trip was a celebration of their friendship and also kind of a farewell to each other and to this period of time in their life.
The event may signify a personal attribute of the student. For example, an athletic contest may symbolize their hard work and determination or their commitment to training and self-improvement. Often, students write about sports, academic achievements, financial goals, and physical accomplishments.
The experience could also connect to broader ideas, cultural attributes, or philosophies. For example, an international trip taken during childhood may represent “childhood” or “diversity,” or the birth of a child may represent motherhood/fatherhood. Many students often write about major life events such as unplanned pregnancies, medical complications, car accidents, abusive relationships, and other major events that have shaped their life.
Then, either in a subsequent paragraph, or within one of the previous paragraphs, students connect their experience to something in the reading assignment. Often, students agree or disagree or challenge or problematize or question what the author wrote, or their experience can be thematically connected without much direct interaction with the reading. (For the purpose of the essay, I encourage students to engage with the reading assignment directly.)
This connection is easier to do when the student is already making broader statements about the personal experience. From this generalized commentary, the student can transition to commentary about the reading assignment. For example, if a student is writing about the birth of a child, they can easily agree or disagree with the statement about motherhood the writer is making.
Reading Assignments
Students are guided in this essay assignment by examples of published writers who are reflecting on an experience/event students are likely to have experienced as well. Thus, the reading assignment provides both an example of memoir/reflective writing and also a shared experience for commentary. These reading assignments are also where I integrate traditional English Composition readings and works by diverse authors.
Specific reading assignments I have used have varied over the semesters, depending the reading textbook that was assigned to the class. At times, reading selections have been more classical, literary, contemporary, or arranged thematically to focus directly on a range of topics; these topics have included racism, education, sexual violence, gender difference, family, childhood, alcoholism, communication skills, international travel, music and the arts, and more. Students were also encouraged to explore other readings and select one that was not covered in class.
I am trying to identify specific readings and themes students focused on, but it honestly varied between semesters and from student to student. When reading assignments focused on classical education, students wrote about their love of books or an important class project. When readings focused on communication, students wrote about an argument or misunderstanding they had with a loved one. When readings focused on family or international travel, they also wrote about a family trip or vacation. I think students adjusted their writing topic to the topic of the reading selection.
Grading Rubric
The grading rubric is similar to my previous symbolism essay assignment. Components of the rubric include the following criteria:
- Explicit thesis statement that provides a “dominant impression” or “lesson learned” about a personal experience/event.
- Effective narrative development or detailed background information about the experience/event – usually as a separate paragraph.
- At least two body paragraphs that provide a detailed discussion/reflection of what the experience/event means/symbolizes or the lessons learned. (Basically any kind of inductive reasoning from event to conclusion.)
- Engagement with the ideas from a reading assignment – general thematic alignment is okay, specific agreement/disagreement or other direct commentary is better.
- Essay is organized into separate paragraphs, and each paragraph contains a unique idea based on reflection.
- Each paragraph begins with a transition phrase and a topic statement; the topic statement presents a conclusion based on reflection.
- The analysis and explanation is personalized to the student and the reading assignment, and the reflection is sophisticated and reasonable, not generalized or stereotypical or cliché statements about experiences/events.
- The sentence-level writing is accurate and effective, includes a variety of sentence styles, and is free of grammatical errors.
- The essay includes accurate documentation of an outside source (the reading selection), which includes accurate quoting or paraphrasing, speaker tags, in-text citations, and a reference citation.
Conclusion
In a first-semester English Composition course, the reflection essay assignment helps students develop analytical thinking and writing skills. Students learn to draw conclusions from personal experiences and organize ideas effectively into well-structured paragraphs. Students also begin to incorporate the ideas of others and identify various forms of “response” (agree/disagree/question). Students also begin to practice documentation skills through quotations, paraphrases, speaker tags, in-text citations, and reference citations.
More broadly, students also learn that reflective writing often forms the basis of many larger writing projects. A writer experiences an event, reflects on it, identifies some broader talking points about, and then writes about it. As they write about the event, they have several choices. They can expand the narrative and write creatively, they can focus on their growth and write a personal memoir, or they can expand into broader discussions of culture and policy and begin to advocate and make specific arguments.
Lirim Neziroski, Ph.D., MBA, MSIS is a higher education administrator, an education consultant, a writer, and a previous faculty member with expertise in higher education leadership, instructional technology, curriculum development, academic assessment, and leadership of academic and online programs. Contact Lirim for individual mentoring and assistance with writing and editing.
Lirim Neziroski 
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