5.      Reflective language

 

Tone of Reflective Writing: Personal & Formal

• Reflections are subjective, whereas academic essays usually need to be objective. In reflective writing, you are expected to reflect on your personal experience and how you felt about things you did. So your writing should be personal. 

 

→ Use first-person pronouns, i.e., ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘we’ and ‘our’.  You are reflecting on yourself,     

      your thoughts, and your understanding, so using the first person is not only

      acceptable, but expected.

 

• Although reflective writing is a personal exercise, it should still be a formal piece of academic writing.  You still need to write in complete, grammatically correct sentences with accurate spelling and punctuation.  To make your language sound as formal as possible, you should avoid using language features that are characteristic of spoken casual conversation, such as:

 

→ colloquial or slang words (e.g. use ‘dismiss’ instead of ‘sack’)

→ contractions (e.g. use ‘cannot’ instead of ‘can’t’)

→ abbreviations (e.g. use ‘laboratory’ instead of ‘lab’)

→ spoken-like grammatical structures such as run-on sentences or sentence fragments

 

Language points when describing your experience

• Almost always use the past tense (e.g. ‘I saw …’, ‘I noticed …’, ‘I/ they said …’, ‘I had …’, ‘I/ they did …’, ‘I heard …’)

 

Language points when interpreting your experience

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Language points when evaluating the effectiveness

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Language points when outlining your plans