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BBC - Intermediate 2 Bitesize English - Personal reflective essay : Revision, Print

Intermediate 2 Bitesize
English
Personal reflective essay

Writing a Personal Reflective Essay

In this type of writing, your purpose is to engage your reader with more than just a re-telling of a story. You must reflect on your experience and really outline how you have changed as a person and how your life has been affected or impacted. Personal Writing This is writing about something that has happened in your life and has really impacted on you for good or bad. For example: Something that has changed your life - birth, death, illness or an issue. Something that really annoys you - racism, bigotry or social inequalities. You will be writing about your memories of an event or experience which you had significant feelings about before, during and afterwards. You are not re-telling the story. Reflection This is perhaps the more difficult segment. When reflecting you really need to think about yourself and how the personal experience changed you. You are reflecting on memories of your feelings, expressing them, reflecting on them with thoughts and opinions, and considering them with the power of hindsight (looking back). What have you learned about yourself? How have you grown? Developed? Changed? Statements such as: "Looking back", "I can see now" can all start the reflective thinking process. A reflective essay: Explores some aspect of the world. Presents your thoughts and feelings on it Discusses how you think it has affected the person you are today. Describes the person you are/your opinions of yourself.

Guide to writing a personal reflective essay

Plan your essay. Do some research. Read newspapers the comments or opinion sections are often personal or magazines, or watch debate programmes such as The Big Question. Edit your work. Your first attempt is never going to be your best draft. Rework it. Reflect on each paragraph if you have to. Jot down ideas, feelings, memories or opinions as they come into your head, and think about why you feel like that. Topic: You need to introduce your topic early on. Grasp your reader's attention. You can do this in a number of ways: A small anecdote. A quote. Starting with end of the story and working backwards. A flashback. Interest: The main body of the essay needs to be interesting. Some pupils spend so much time on the introduction that the main essay becomes boring and flat. Motif: Have a motif or symbol running through your essay. For example: The dark patterned armchair in the corner of the living room is always there. It holds her and her worries. It holds the pain that is still blatantly apparent. It holds my mum and as I gaze into her frail weak eyes- I still feel the torture she endures on a daily basis. Her eyes dart back and forth yet I know she hides her pain. She's crumbling inside and will not be healed- just like the tatty hole in the arm chair in which she picks and picks until no more foam can be found. She picks and picks at her brain- blaming herself "Why us?, Why my baby?" circulating her thoughts at every turn. There are no answers and although I thought things will never be the same again... I now know that they never will. Tone: Make sure your tone and personality are shining through. Anecdotes: Use anecdotes to engage your reader. For example: I have always wanted to be an actress. It is my main ambition. I have always wanted to be an actress could become: Acting: it has been my sole ambition ever since the day I met David Tennant on a plane coming back from holiday. We sat for

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BBC - Intermediate 2 Bitesize English - Personal reflective essay : Revision, Print

hours chatting and planning my next step in my soon to be startling career Well no, not really, but this is what acting is all about - pretending to be someone else for day, an hour, a while. Use sophisticated vocabulary. Think of word choice and the effect you want. A wide range of adjectives or descriptions is essential for personal reflective writing. Try not to use adjectives such as happy or sad or nice or good or OK, they don't really tell us how you felt about something, and they do not reflect your personality. Successful personal writing also uses a wide range of verbs. Verbs help you to describe to the reader exactly how you did something and how you felt while you were doing it. Try not to use verbs that are over-used, such as said or went or walked or laughed or cried. Some people come right out and say how they feel. Other people imply (through some of the techniques we've discussed) how they feel. For any piece of writing you have looked at, use one colour to highlight the explicit feelings and a second colour to highlight implicit feelings. Punctuation: Use a variety. Everything that you see in a Close Reading paper should be present in an essay: colon, parenthesis, ellipsis, semicolon, dash etc. Imagery: Use a variety of imagery to describe your emotions. Compare your sadness, tears, happiness, excitement, nerves, panic etc. to something else. Turning point: Every personal experience has to have a turning point. This is a point in which your line of thought or perspective changes. Reflection: Perhaps the most vital element. You need to think about how the experience has changed you or others. Look back at the turning point and think: What have you learned about yourself? How have you changed? What could you have done differently?

Example Personal Essay: shortened version

"We all know about racism; we even know about ageism; but do we really know about the daily jibes and abuse that is aimed at some people due to the colour of their hair appearing: odd, weird, strange, horrible, freaky... RED?" Engaging introduction. Topic outlined. Sentence structure building to a climax. "Looking into the mirror I could see it. My long flowing hair causing me hours and hours of misery. Closing my eyes I prayed it would disappear or even fade. No amount of make up, hairstyles or different clothes masked my feelings of hate for the hair I had been genetically inflicted with." The mirror is a symbol that is referred to again at the end of the essay. Hey Ginger, can I get a heat is a phrase commonly repeated to people inflicted with red hair. A humorous tone is established. "From an early age the comments made to me about the colour of my hair has irritated me to my inner core. On my first day at Secondary School it was a scorching summer's days. I felt so hot and nervous that beads of sweat formed on my forehead as I stood waiting in the playground. My heart was pounding and a strong feeling of trepidation strongly lingered as I wondered what my new teachers would be like. However, when I entered the school, that's when everything changed. I could hear them. I could hear the hyena like laughs. I could hear the comments of check the state of her hair. That's horrible. At this, I felt like I had been ripped apart. I was in pain and just wanted to escape and not return. Tears began to obscure my vision as I desperately tried to escape and hide. I frantically rushed to the toilet and dreaded the rest of the day. Why did they have to say this to me? Why would they say such a thing? I just couldn't understand. I have never been able to erase this feeling from my memory." "A long time has now passed since these initial comments; unfortunately they continued on a regular basis. I would regularly beg and plead with my mother to dye my hair so that I could feel more normal. The hair styling aisle at the local supermarket would call to me as soon as it entered and mocked me as I left-minus any hair dye. Even my Uncle-at the birth of his daughter, said Phew... for a minute I thought she had red hair, thank God it's not. It is these types of remarks that really infuriate me. People may only utter these words for a few seconds, but these words resonate within your mind for years to come and eat away at you like a vicious case of woodworm; eventually leading you to feel unworthy of functioning in the real world. "Now that I have grown older, I still have red hair but I no longer feel so distressed about it. Looking back, I now understand that these people (or bullies) found something that-in their opinion - was my flaw." This is the reflective element. They pounced upon me like a piece of prey and succeeded in crushing my confidence. More importantly though, I recently faced a huge turning point. Last year a close friend of my family was diagnosed with cancer. I remember meeting her at the local supermarket and she had lost all of her hair; yet was still smiling. The pain and suffering that this gentle woman was experiencing was excruciating and much more extreme than any feelings that I had ever endured. She later died. She had passed away.

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Died.

BBC - Intermediate 2 Bitesize English - Personal reflective essay : Revision, Print

This is the turning point, and the isolated sentence is used for effect. "Her death was so unfair. When I received the news... I was dazed and confused; this is what it really felt like to be ripped apart. My ludicrous, shallow worries about my hair colour were dramatically put into perspective and really made me re-evaluate what was important in life. For too long I have wasted time thinking about hair colour and appearance. I have now learned that it's OK to be different. I know that I was not the first person with red hair to be picked on, and I will not be the last." Reflection on what has been learned. "If I am truthful, I actually don't want to blend into the background-I just want to be me. The society we live within in is looks obsessed but it doesn't mean that I have to be. I now like the fact that my hair is: odd, weird, freaky and dare I say... GINGER! Looking into the mirror, I now know that I am so worth it!" The symbol of the mirror is referred to again at the end.

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