How to Write a Reflective Essay Outline

How to Write a Reflective Essay Outline A reflective essay is one of the most common papers students have to write during their educational years. Even though this task may sound like an easy one, it is actually not quite so, as exploring your own thoughts and feelings on a particular event, topic, or your personal experience is indeed challenging. If you have ever been assigned to write this type of essay, you know what it means! While to describe something and reflect on it seems to be much less complicated than to prove your point of view in a persuasive essay, the truth is that such an assignment requires deep insight and really good critical thinking and writing skills. After all, you will never get a high grade, if your writing is disorganized, uninteresting, or aimless. This is exactly why you need a reflective essay outline. However, before we provide you with some useful tips on how to write a reflective essay outline, let’s first find out why you actually need it and how it can be used! Writing a good reflective essay outline is like creating a roadmap that can help you organize your thoughts and stay focused on the main idea of your work. Moreover, if you create a plan for your essay and write down all its major points and important details beforehand, it will subsequently save much your time and improve the efficiency. Therefore, if you want to compose a logically structured paper able to bring you an A, a reflective essay outline is a must have. Besides, it is the best way to stay on the right track and to ensure that nothing relevant is omitted. Now as you know the importance of writing a good reflective essay outline, it’s high time to learn how to actually create and structure it. Guide on writing a good reflective essay outline 1. Pick a topic. Since a reflective essay is all about analyzing your personality, life, or certain experience, to pick the right topic for your writing is very important. In fact, this choice is rather limited if compared to most other essay types and includes only those topics related to yourself, events in your life, and your surroundings. However, it does not mean that you should write about the first thing that comes to your mind. Think carefully in order to choose the topic that is interesting not only to your but also to your reader. 2. Build a thesis statement. Even though a reflective essay does not require from you to include any evidence or proven facts to support its main idea, you still need a thesis statement. After all, this piece of writing is still an academic paper and, therefore, has to be meaningful to the reader. Moreover, if you want your work to be interesting, make sure your thesis is arguable and can be discussed. 3. Write an outline for the introduction part. Once the topic is chosen, and the thesis statement is built, you are ready to create your reflective essay outline. Obviously, you should start with the introduction part. This will be your first paragraph, so do your best to make it truly eye-catching. There are several major things to include in your outline: ? a good hook to attract the attention; ? some background information on your topic explaining your choice; ? your thesis statement to introduce the main idea of your writing. 4. Write an outline for the body part. Since writing a good reflective essay outline means to properly structure all the main points, to follow certain rules is crucial, especially when it comes to the body part. So what to pay your attention to? First of all, whatever your topic, keep everything in chronological order. This will help your reader better understand what you are writing about. Second, you are required not only to describe a certain event or experience but also to explore its impact on you. In general, you need to include the following points in your outline: ? the description of the certain event; ? its positive or negative impact on you; ? analysis of the described event, its effect, and your feelings. 5. Write an outline for the conclusion part. The concluding paragraph of your essay should bring all the information written in the body together. Moreover, you need to restate your thesis in order to underline your opinion and reflections on the described event or experience. Include these major points in your reflective essay outline to use them later in writing. Now as know how to write a reflective essay outline, you are ready to actually start writing your paper. Stick to the major points you have written down, and your final essay is guaranteed to be logical, interesting, and effective. Start early, be confident in your skills, and you are sure to succeed!