If you generally do well at written assignments, then essay-writing advice may feel like revision, but if you work your way through the exercises, they will help you to develop a wider repertoire of writing styles. If you worry about writing and know that your marks could be better, the structure here will not just help you with reflective writing, but will have the added benefit of improving your ability in other written work.

Let’s get started: most of you reading this book will have chosen your area of study because you are people who learn by being hands-on and doing. All of you have chosen a career path which involves working with and learning from others; writing implies introspection and solitude, so:

Why write?

Often when students are asked to write for reflective practice, they ask why they need to write things down when they can ‘remember’ what happened. The problem with ‘remembering’ is that memory is selective and often things we remember one day we have forgotten the next, and vice versa. How many times have you ended up in the supermarket desperately trying to remember the thing you came for, only to go home without it? Writing a list of what you need helps to solve this problem; it also has the added bonus of saving you time ‘remembering’ and needing to go back for something you have forgotten. Writing for reflection can help you save time by cutting out the need to re-visit something time and time again to collect all the facts.

New technology has expanded on the way in which we can record things. We have a friend who regularly rings her home answer-phone to leave messages to herself about what she needs to have for work the next day. You, on the other hand, may hate to listen to the sound of yourself on the answer-phone, so use a note book. Others use their smart phones or computer note pad. In this chapter, all these ways of recording come under the banner of writing for reflection.

TIME FOR REFLECTION

How do you work best? Think about the ways in which you record your thoughts and reflections. Make a point of having your preferred method to hand, and starting to note things as they occur to you.

The tension between writing reflections that you think your tutor will be pleased with, and being truthful about yours and others’ practice, can be difficult. Assessed reflections for health care students (Hargreaves, 2004) often follow one of three narrative lines. Firstly, the person reflecting narrates a situation in which they improve the outcome. Secondly, where something goes wrong and the reflection is about blame and guilt, the narrator shows what was done incorrectly and identifies the right course of action. Thirdly, through reflection the person narrating recognizes and changes some aspect of their own or others’ practice. The argument goes that these are ‘legitimate’ reflections; they are likely to be viewed by others as demonstrating the right attitudes and understandings of the profession, and thus yield good marks. Reflections for assessments that do not follow these forms may be viewed as ‘illegitimate’ and, unless they are written very skilfully, are less likely to get the writer a good mark.

There is a small but growing area of literature challenging the value of assessment of reflection. See, for example, studies on reflective practice in teaching students, who write in their journals what they believe the tutor wants to read (Hobbs, 2007), the link between reflection and acting (Clegg, Tan & Saeidi, 2002), and the role that moving to online reflection may have in affective authenticity (Ross, 2011). The case against assessing reflection is discussed in more detail in chapter 9.

This chapter concentrates on writing with an individual voice; reflecting with others is different and will be discussed in chapter 5. Wherever possible, the exercises and illustrations are designed to be built into what you are already doing as part of your course, or your working life.

EXERCISE

Hold on!

Using the essay title above, this chapter will now walk you through the process of writing a reflective essay for assessment. We will explore:

the timeline for writing the essay

planning the essay: introduction and development

reading, research and references

re-writing and re-drafting

conclusion

moving on

The timeline for writing the essay

Illogical as it may seem, the easiest way to get a well-written essay in on time is to work backwards from the delivery date. For this illustration, we assume the essay length is 1,500 words; that the essay title has been given out at the end of the first week of the Spring Semester and it is due in on 1 April. This means that you have roughly twelve weeks in which to write your essay. Your first reaction has probably been ‘Loads of time!’, but look at the rest of the work which has to be handed in for marking. In all probability, you may have two or three pieces, all of which will have a similar deadline.

We are sure you have already experienced the stress of handing something in on time. You may have your own horror story of your computer giving up the ghost or your cat getting lost or the bus being late when you have to have the essay in by 9 a.m. The easiest way to avoid being in this situation is to aim to have the essay ready a couple of days before you need to hand it in. Mark this day on your calendar as the day you complete your final draft. Now have a look at the space you have for writing and find a date by which you can have your first draft complete. Moving back from that, look at when you need to start writing, sort your notes, finish reading, collect evidence and structure your essay.

Planning the essay

It is easy to think that because you are writing from reflection all you have to say is what you did, why you did it and come to a conclusion, and therefore you don’t need an essay plan. Many students think that planning an essay wastes time but, as with the shopping-list example at the beginning of this chapter, essay planning is one of the most effective things you can do to save time and effort when writing any essay. A good essay plan will mean that you stick to the subject. This means you will be able to concentrate your reading and necessary research on the topic in hand. Reading in depth will allow you to develop your ideas. It is the development and discussion of ideas that tutors are looking for when marking your essay.

Introduction

Your introduction needs to tell the person marking the essay how you are going to answer the question. As people who have read a lot of essays, we will try and give you an idea of what is going on in the mind of your tutor when they mark your essay.

Here are three possible introductions: read them and decide for yourself which you find the most interesting one. Can you identify why you have chosen that one instead of the others?

(1)  The Oxford English Dictionary Online defines ‘assess’ as ‘evaluate or estimate the nature, ability, or quality of’. In this essay I will evaluate the quality of an intervention I have made with a service user during my time at university. I will start by describing the nature of the intervention, the outcome and what I have learnt from it.

(2)  Working in a hospital, I was shocked to discover that there were people I did not like. I thought my training had prepared me to be non-judgemental. Using Gibbs’ cycle of reflective practice (Ghaye & Lillyman, 2006), I will explore how my response to a situation has led to a change in my professional practice.

(3)  Reflective practice lies at the heart of my practice. It is something that everyone working in the field needs to know how to do. When you reflect, you think about what you have done, what you could have done and what you are going to do differently next time.

In Example 1 the student has felt the need to look up the word ‘assess’, which immediately makes the reader of the essay feel that the student is un-confident about what they are doing. The dictionary is referenced but the fact that it is ‘Online’ makes the tutor wonder whether the rest of the essay is going to have been downloaded and whether the sources are reliable.

The final example shows that the student knows what he is doing but has no referencing to back up the assertions made.

EXERCISE

Using one of the above examples, complete the rest of the introduction in such a way as to make the reader feel you know your subject and have relevant and interesting things to say about it. If you would like to use Gibbs’ model, we have reproduced it as figure 4.1 to help.