Reflective Writing | Academic Skills Kit

Reflective writing style

Personal 

The key difference between reflective writing and most forms of academic writing style is that you are writing in the first person ‘I’. Your voice is very present in the text because you are writing about yourself. You have to write ‘I’ when you are describing things that you did, thought and felt, and things that happened to you: “I did’, ‘I decided’, ‘I was frustrated’, ‘he said to me’. You also write ‘I’ when you are reflecting on these past events in the present, so you can write ‘I think’, ‘I will’, ‘I now understand’ ‘I need to’. 

Formality 

You are also often quoting or paraphrasing things that you or others said and writing about perceptions and feelings and other ‘real life’ things that are hard to scientifically quantify or characterise. Your language can therefore be a little less formal than in traditional academic writing: ‘he was really annoyed’ ‘I don’t think it matters that much’, ‘it was just too important’. Reflective writing is still a professional form though, so it needs to keep some formality and neutrality.  

Critical analysis 

Writing in the first person in a slightly less formal tone can sometimes lead us to overlook the need to be objective and unpack your reasoning for the reader. Reflection can then become a descriptive, unselective account of everything that happened, or a series of unsubstantiated statements which are easy to say, but too generic or too sweeping to be credible.  

Reflective writing is still quite academic in that it is critical, reasoned and evidenced, demonstrating higher level thinking beyond description, and your style will demonstrate this. To be critical of your own experience doesn’t mean criticising your own performance but to ask yourself critical questions to unpack it fully for yourself and the reader, such as  

• Why is that significant? How is it relevant? 
• How do I know that? What makes me think that? 
• What do I mean by that? 
• Why did that happen? What explains that? 
• Am I sure of that? How else could I see it? 

To help you answer these questions, you will be using evidence and often academic literature as part of your account.  

Using evidence and theory

You will be presenting evidence in the form of concrete examples from your experience, but these still need to be analysed and interpreted, just as you would for evidence from scholarship and research. Rather than just a list of things you’ve done with your own assessment of how successful they were, you need to explain and interpret these examples to show how they demonstrate your development and how you know they were successful (or not). It is useful where possible to include external forms of evidence, such as feedback from other people or tangible, measurable outcomes. 

You may also be interpreting your experiences in the light of theory, using academic research or professional frameworks to help explain and analyse your experiences, contextualise them in the light of what we know more generally to see if your experience is common, unusual or meeting the criteria, and help underpin your decision making. Reflective writing doesn’t always have references to literature in it as it’s mainly about you, but bringing in some theory might be helpful, depending on the assignment type.