Week 2 - Reflective Writing

In this week the topic of the lecture was about “Reflective Writing” and we also had some more in-depth talk about the importance of PDP.

We learned about what is Reflective Practice beforehand and about Gibb’s Reflective Cycle before talking about Reflective Writing. Afterwards, we defined Reflective Writing as a process that : a) by the usage of reflective cycle and writing one becomes better at learning, b) its primary purpose is learning and c) gives a transformative nature in writing.

The next part of the lecture was about the distinction between essay writing and reflective writing. The main difference between these 2 categories was that essay writing is more likely to be 100% subjective while reflective writing not necessarily. 

In addition, we examined sentence structure for variety and the features of reflective writing, in order to become more apt in organizing our thoughts in text, to improve our creativity when writing, to train our analytical skills and to develop critical thinking. 

After this part, there was some in depth analysis about Prewriting (Invention). The Prewriting process was composed by 3 steps: 1) Analyze the title in order to explain and to show “how it differs from”,  2) do an analyze plan of the title and 3) to draw a mind map of the concepts.  We also become familiar with the six finger approach when mind mapping, a process that can summarize the meaning of the title of the essay by using six simple questions.

The last part of the lecture was about proper essay structure. A well made essay is composed by 3 parts, an introduction, the main body of the essay and the conclusion. The introduction part ideally should introduce the general topic of the essay and contain the writers thesis statement. When writing the main body paragraphs, the writer must keep in mind that the first sentence of each paragraph is always the most important one and that he should make proper use of supporting sentences. The concluding paragraph is the signal of the incoming end of the essay, it should remind to the reader the writers main subtopics in short and to leave the reader with your final thoughts on the essay topic.

That was the end of the lecture, and I must say that I found this lecture quite of note for many reasons. Mainly, I found the lecture interesting not because I learned something (I was already familiar with almost everything discussed) but because it allowed me to point out some minor flaws that I had in reflective writing. I honestly hope that by organizing a bit more my reflective writing and eliminating the flaws I have to be able to write way better essays. Another thing, that I would like to mention is that one thing I also learned today is that no matter how good we are at something we can always improve and there is always ways to improve our knowledge on certain matters/topics.

G.