Once you know what incident you plan to recount, the lesson you learned or the insight you gained, and how you want to organize your thoughts, you're ready for the next step: writing your first draft.
Throughout this module, you have recorded journal entries, anecdotes, and your own thoughts and feelings about your experiences. Use these, as well as any other notes, to write your reflective essay. Include descriptive details that help your readers experience what you experienced and also enhance the telling of your story. As you write, keep in mind that this is your story told from your perspective. It's your turn to tell the world about something you experienced—and what you learned from it.
Turn it in!
Be sure to structure your essay using one of the four organizational patterns you learned about in this lesson—chronological, cause and effect, comparison/contrast, or problem—solution. When you have completed your first draft, submit the document to your teacher. Your work on this assignment will be graded using the rubric below.
| Superior 5 points |
Average 3 points |
Poor 1 points |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | ||
| Your essay is sharply focused on one event or situation and its meaning or significance for you. | Your essay is mostly—but not entirely—focused on one event or situation and its meaning or significance for you. | Instead of staying focused on one event or situation and its meaning or significance for you, your essay wanders from topic to topic. |
| Details | ||
| The many sensory details you include in your essay make the story both memorable and compelling. Your use of figurative language and other literary devices adds meaning and nuance to your essay. | You include some sensory details and figurative language in your essay. However, more of these elements would have made your essay more interesting and meaningful. | Your essay contains too few sensory details to hold most readers' interest. It may also lack figurative language or other devices that might help convey its deeper meaning or its importance to you. |
| Ordering Details | ||
| You chose the best organizational pattern for your particular topic or story, and you used it in a way that made your ideas easy to follow. | You chose a suitable organizational pattern for your topic, but your use of it was not consistent throughout the essay, creating some confusion. | The organizational pattern that you selected for your essay was probably not the most useful. At times the details seem unrelated. |
| Overall Structure | ||
| The beginning of your essay provides a clear context for the story you plan to share. Your description of events flows logically and smoothly. Your thoughts about the experience also are nicely integrated. | The beginning of your essay provides some context for the experience you describe. Your description of events and what you learned from the experience flow smoothly together most of the time. | Your reflective essay provides too little context for readers to understand what happened or why it matters to you now. Your description of the event was hard to follow at times. |
