The Reflective Essay
By now you should have selected and begun revising your interpretive essay for your portfolio. Remember that you will need to submit two essays in your final portfolio: one interpretive essay and one reflective essay. For homework, in addition to continuing your work on your interpretive essay, please write a first draft of your reflective essay. Begin by reviewing the reflective course goals:
In the REFLECTIVE ESSAY, account for and evaluate
• The language and design choices you made in your interpretive essay.
• The reading, writing, and revision practices you undertook throughout the semester to create your academic text
• Your experiences in the course and their impact on how you created various texts.
Now, write a three-page reflective essay in which you discuss the language and design choices you made in your interpretive essay as well as the reading, writing, and revision practices you under took throughout the semester and the ways in which those practices affected your interpretive essay. To help, you may want to consider the following:
• The processes for reading and annotating a text you have learned.
• How you take reading notes.
• How you identify key terms or key ideas when you first encounter a text.
• The specific strategies you have learned for critical interpretation.
o How to develop critical questions about a text as a reader or as a writer.
o How you understand the content, purpose, intended audience, shared concerns, design strategies, language choices, genre, or other composing decisions - and how you determine what's important about them.
• Any new reading or writing practices that you have learned this semester.
• Your English 095 experience with our course texts, our class discussions, our class activities, your experience in the Writing Center, and anything else you think is important.