1.6: Reflection and Drawing Conclusions

Reflect

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Water reflection by Yuma Hori is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Whenever you finish a bit of college reading, it’s worth your time to stop and reflect on it. This not only helps you think about the content and what it means to you, but it also helps cement it within your memory, allowing you to recall the key ideas later and to apply them in other reading and writing situations.

Here are two ideas for post-reading reflection:

• Write in a personal reading journal.
• Angelo and Cross suggest writing a “minute paper.” To do this, take one minute to jot down a few sentences about something you learned or discovered while reading. Or ask yourself a question about the reading and write an answer.  (See the entry for Angelo and Cross in the Appendix, “Works Cited in This Text.”)

Explore the Ways the Text Affects You

When you work with a text, you enter into a conversation with it, responding with your thoughts, ideas, and feelings. The way each of us responds to any text has a lot to do with who we are: our age, education, cultural background, religion, ethnicity, and so forth.

As you explore a text, be aware of how you’re responding to it.

• Are you reading or exploring easily and fluidly, or are you finding it difficult to navigate the text? Why do you believe this is so?
• Do you find yourself responding with some sort of strong emotion? If so, why do you think that may be happening?
• Do formatting or structural issues (examples: unusual use of punctuation, use of dialect or jargon) affect your navigation of the text?
• Can you identify with the text’s central idea or the information it’s sharing?
• Have you had any experiences like those being described? Can you identify with the story?
• Are you able to identify the surface meaning?
• Have you explored the text’s deeper, hidden messages?
• Do you need to look up any words to do any quick research? If so, does this help you better understand the text?
• What questions do you have about the work?

Conclusions, Synthesizing, and Reflecting

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J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye photo by Andy Field is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Synthesizing

To synthesize is to combine ideas and create a completely new idea. That new idea becomes the conclusion you have drawn from your reading. This is the true beauty of reading: it causes us to weigh ideas, to compare, judge, think, and explore—and then to arrive at a moment that we hadn’t known before. We begin with a simple summary, work through analysis, evaluate using critique, and then move on to synthesis.

For example, many people read J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye at some point during their lives, often during high school. The book focuses on an angsty, rebellious teen who relates aspects of his teenage experiences, and he does this from his room in a mental institution. In the end, the teen understands more about himself and the world, and he begins to consider his possible future.

Many teens read this story and see themselves in it; grappling with the ideas in the text helps them better understand themselves and often encourages them to reach for their own futures. This is an example of how they draw their own conclusions from the text and synthesize their own directions and ideas.

Most of us can point to one or two books that have been life-changing—books that have held us captive for a moment in time and shaped our outlook. These are moments of synthesis. If this hasn’t happened to you yet, grab a good book (ask a teacher or librarian if you need suggestions), pour a cup of tea, and start reading.

What is self-analysis?

Emilie Zickel

Source: A guide to Rhetoric, Genre and Success in First Year students and

How is reflective writing in the academic setting different from journaling or writing in a diary?

If you write in a diary or a journal, recording your thoughts and feelings about what has happened in your life, you are certainly engaging in the act of reflection. Many of us have some experience with this type of writing. In our diaries, journals, or other informal spaces for speaking – or writing- our mind,  write to ourselves, for ourselves, in a space that will largely remain private.

Your reflection for college courses will contain some of those same features:

• The subject of the reflective work is you and your experiences
• You can generally use the first person in a reflective essay

Writing academic reflections is a bit different from journaling or keeping a diary:

What can be gained from activities that ask you to reflect on your learning and your performance as a writer?

One of the major goals in any First-Year Writing class is to encourage students’ growth as writers. No one is expected to be a perfect writer at the end of the semester. Your instructor’s hope, however, is that after completing coursework, you are more confident, capable, and aware of yourself as a writer than you were at the beginning of the semester. Reflecting on the process that you go through as you write – even if your writing is not perfect – can help you to identify the behaviours, strategies, and resources that have helped you to be successful or that could support your future success. In short, reflecting on how you write (or how you have written during a particular semester) can be quite powerful in helping you to identify areas where you have grown and areas where you still have room for more growth.

How can I write a reflective piece?

As with any assignment, a reflection piece should come with its own assignment sheet. On that assignment sheet, you should be able to identify what the purpose of the reflection is and what the scope of the reflection needs to be. Some key elements of the reflective piece that the assignment sheet should answer are:

• What, exactly, the scope of the reflection is. Are you reflecting on one lesson, one assignment, or the whole semester?
• Do you have detailed guidelines, resources, or reference documents that must be met for your reflections?
• Is there a particular structure for the reflection?
• Should the reflection include any outside resources?

If you are struggling to find the answers to these questions, ask your professor!

Another wonderful resource for writing a reflective essay comes from Writing Commons, in the article “Writing an Academic Reflection Essay”. This article offers great information  about the following:

• What it means to be “academic” or “critical” and at the same time personal and reflective
• How you can achieve focus in a reflective essay
• What “evidence” is in a reflective essay

Attribution: The section on Reflect  and Conclusions, Synthesizing, and Reflecting in “1.6 Reflection and Drawing Conclusions ” is adapted from The Word on College Reading and Writing by Carol Burnell; Jaime Wood; Monique Babin; Susan Pesznecker; and Nicole Rosevear,  licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Attribution: The section on What is Rhetoric? in “1.3: Rhetoric” is adapted from A Guide to Rhetoric, Genre, and Success in First-Year Writing (The Interactive 2nd Edition) by Melanie Gagich & Emilie Zickel, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.