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Back to ForumBack to English Composition I syllabus, fall 1999
Osborne, EC I, fall 1999, Reflective Essay Assignment (#2)
Draft due Oct. 13; you may also wish to post the draft as a message to the forum
Revised draft due Oct. 27.Assignment: Build a reflective expressive essay (see pp. 71-72) based on the prereading journal assignment on p. 62 in Readings Are Writings (RAW). “Sometimes we are faced with hard decisions, moral dilemmas that make us think very seriously about right and wrong. The pressure to make such decisions sometimes comes from peers or authority figures and sometimes from within us. Think of a time when you have faced a moral dilemma and had to make a decision about what to do. Describe the circumstances surrounding the dilemma and how you came to a decision about it.”
Notice the word “describe.” You are to describe the circumstances of the dilemma and how you came to a decision. You will need to use specific detail in this essay to make us see and hear what you saw and heard, etc.
Reflective Essays are very much still expressive essays like the first essay you wrote. Review the assignment for the 1st Expressive Essay. You will want this essay to have the same strengths as that essay—vivid details, etc. But this time you also need to develop a stronger sense of how your particular experience illustrates something that perhaps all humans share, or how your particular experience illustrates something that we all need to pay more attention to. Reflective essays are also like invitations first to relate to a personal story and then to see this narrative in a larger context. “Readers need to see the connections between what happened to you and what happens to others or what is happening in the world” (RAW 72). As a writer you will need both to draw readers into your personal story and then pull back from that personal engagement to a more reflective stance that lets you comment directly or indirectly on its significance for others.. Making the significance of your story clear “does not mean that you need to hit your readers over the head with it” (RAW 69). Try to avoid “tacking on” a cliché such as “what I learned from this was” at the end. Be sure to develop the experience well enough so that the reader will have the experience too. Then the reader will be more likely to listen to your brief reflections about the experience
As you brainstorm and draft and rewrite this essay, think about the “you” that the reader will see and hear in the essay. What kind of voice do you want to use and what kind of relationship do you want to create with your readers? What impression are you trying to make? Remember, you control the impression you make in your writing. You create the “persona” of the writer that your readers relate to. Do you want to project yourself as an innocent person in this experience? As a victim? As an overconfident person who learned a lesson? As a person who had never thought about ethics or moral issues until this experience? Do you want to sound informal and ordinary, or learned and wise? Do you want to win readers over by sounding very down-to-earth, or do you want to impress them with your maturity? All kinds of choices are available to you as the writer. Create the best persona for the subject and the purpose of your essay.
Peer Review tips
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