The A-Z of Reflective Essays

Every person has one or the other grand moment in his or her life, which alters the person’s life forever, and steers it in a completely different direction. This could be as simple as baking a cake for friends and realizing how much you love to do it and pledging to do it forever, or taking a trip to the mountains and understanding the vanity of the daily materialistic life that we all lead.

When one cites these extraordinary and life changing moments in writing in a proper format, it becomes a reflective essay. People especially love to read these reflective essays, since it not only entertains them, but also greatly motivates and inspires them.

How to write an excellent reflective essay?

It is indeed very appealing to write a reflective essay, but it is not easy to write one. In order to write an excellent and influential reflective essay, you would have to sit and think about all those moments that have had a massive impression on your life in some or the other way. There are chances that you might end up with a complete list of such epiphany moments, which is completely normal. All that you now have to do is sort out the list, and find that one moment which has left the most drastic impact on your life. Once you discover that particular moment, you will be able to write a reflective essay pretty easily.

Key points to keep in mind while writing a reflective essay

While writing a reflective essay, the writer’s main aim is to grab the attention of the reader, and to then keep the latter hooked up throughout the entire length of the essay. Here are a few tips that will help you to achieve this goal:

• Start with an excellent introduction, and then go on to jot down the incidences that led to the final event.
• It is crucial to define each and every single incident in a proper and systematic order, failing which your essay would become very haphazard and messed up.
• Keep your readers in mind, and then work around the essay keeping their age, interests, intellect levels, etc. in mind.
• Decent vocabulary and sophisticated language are obviously desirable, but do not go over the board by using extremely hard vocabulary and baffling language.

Format of a reflective essay

Just like every essay has an introduction, a main body and a conclusion, a reflective essay comprises of the same elements. Start with introducing your readers to the main moment that you are going to talk about, and also mention about how it is impacted your life. Then go on to talk about the entire episode in detail, making sure that you do not miss out on any crucial information. Sum up the essay with a crisp yet impressive conclusion mentioning how that epiphany moment has altered you as an individual, and your life as a whole.

Reflective essays versus literary essays

It is mandatory to understand the difference between the two kinds of essays, in order to gain an in-depth understanding about reflective essays.

While literary essays can be written about anything and are usually composed in a formal language, reflective essays only deal with life changing episodes, and the language is deliberately kept simple. This is also because these essays target every type of audience and seek to motivate them, while literary essays are written only for a specific kind of audience, and aim at providing information to this particular category of readers.

Possible topics for a reflective essay

Reflective essays have no boundations when it comes to topics. They can be as diverse as the imagination can conceive them to be. This is because every individual comes from a different background, and his or her experiences are largely shaped by that background. Thus, the story of every individual is unique and so are the moments that made or broke them.

This is precisely why students are asked to find their own essay topics while writing a reflective essay. Nevertheless, students still seek assignment help online so that they can write exceptional essays and secure good marks in their college. MakeMyAssignments is one such budding platform that aims to provide affordable and timely assignment services to students, and has expert writers on board who passionately work to achieve these goals.