1.6: Reflection and Self-Analysis
Reflect
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.”)
Check Your Understanding: Reflecting on What You’ve Read
To Come
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?
What is self-analysis?
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:
| Personal diary/journal | Reflection writing for a course | |
| Audience | Only you will read it! (at least, that is often the intention) | Professor, peers, or others will read your work. A reflective piece is written with the intention of submitting it to someone else |
| Purpose | To record your emotions, thoughts, analysis; to get a sense of release or freedom to express yourself | To convey your thoughts, emotions, and analysis about yourself to your audience, while also answering a specific assignment question or set of questions |
| Structure | Free form. No one will be reading or grading your diary or journal, so you get to choose organization and structure; you get to choose whether or not the entries are edited | The reflection should adhere to the style and content that your audience would recognize and expect. These would include traditional paragraph structure, strong proofreading, and whatever else the assignment requires. If you are asked to write an essay, a thesis that conveys your essay’s main points, well-developed body paragraphs |
| Development | Since you are only writing for yourself, you can choose how much or how little to elaborate on your ideas | All of the points you make in the reflection should be developed and supported using examples or evidence which come from your experiences, your actions, or your work |
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
Critical Thinking Exercises
First, read the New York Times article, “Period. Full Stop. Point. Whatever It’s Called, It’s Going Out of Style” by Dan Bilefsky (found at www.nytimes.com).
Next, write a minute paper (see description above) by jotting down a few sentences in response to one of these questions:
- Do you agree with the idea that the period is going out of style? Why or why not?
- Do you agree that ending a text message with a period affects the meaning of the message? Explain.
- What does the author mean when he suggests that leaving the period out of text messages is the “punctuation equivalent of stagehands who dress in black to be less conspicuous”?
See the Appendix, Results for the “Check Your Understanding” Activities, for answers.
Attribution
The section on “Reflect” in “1.6 Reflection and Drawing Conclusions ” is adapted from Reflect 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.
The section on “Self-analysis” in “1.6 Reflection and Drawing Conclusions” is adapted from 6.7 What is self analysis? – A Guide to Rhetoric, Genre, and Success in First-Year Writing (The Interactive 2nd Edition) by Emilie Zickel in 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.