The Self Reflective Essay English Language Essay

Writing of an essay starts with a pre-writing process whereby the writer identifies appropriate invention strategies for his/her essay. This requires evaluation of invention techniques in order to use the ones that convey the objective of the essay to targeted audience. A good essay should have good flow of ideas that are well coordinated to keep the audience reading. It is important to peer review and critique an essay from a different writer as this enables one to critique his/her first draft of essay and make necessary corrections during essay revision. This self reflective essay addresses challenges faced while writing an essay and reflectively proposes solutions to such challenges.

Self Reflective Essay

In writing my essay, the pre- writing strategies that I used were brainstorming, cubing and classical invention. Brainstorming enabled me to break up a block in my thinking and come up with the right ideas concerning essay topic. I started by writing down every association regarding the subject in order to gain focus by subordinating the list of what I wrote into parts that would form the essay. This led me to cubing technique, which helped me to organize my thoughts and gain perspective that would most likely yield right ideas concerning essay topic. In my application for cubing technique, I attempted to describe, compare, associate, analyze and argue for and against the essay topic. I combined cubing technique with classical invention technique to ensure that I give detailed descriptions in my essay definitions, comparisons, relationships, circumstances and testimonies. Combining these three strategies for my prewriting effectively ensured that the essay addressed all relevant areas of essay topic because what was not clear using brainstorming strategy was addressed by cubing and classical invention techniques, which have provisions for more detailed information. I realized that applying different pre-writing techniques is the key to good essay because one technique provides for what is missing in the other one. For example, using brainstorming technique alone gave me many ideas on the subject, which I organized using Cubin and classical invention techniques. These techniques proved effective and I would consider using them for my next essay.

My purpose for writing this essay was to prove to the audience that time has come for educators to change from traditional classroom teaching and learning approaches to disruptive innovative teaching strategies outside classroom that are more exciting to learners and teachers. My audience for the essay was learners and educators. I wanted the audience to know that students who travel to different parts of the world develop better social skills, are less rigid. They are more accommodative, have better problem solving skills and end up being better decision makers than the ones who do not. I wanted the audience to understand that learning should not be confined within classrooms but it should be innovative enough to build learners reasoning, social and cognitive skills. I wanted to completely capture the attention of the audience and get them into thinking about international travel learning and international conferences as disruptive innovative multicultural learning techniques that would equip learners with firsthand experience on different cultures. I wanted to move the audience into thinking of their next international travel learning destination by the time they are through with reading the essay.

In previewing my peer’s essay, I looked for main ideas conveyed in the essay, clarity of the ideas and how the ideas have been expressed and coordinated to flow and capture the attention of the targeted audience. I also looked at how convincing and practical my peer’s ideas were to the targeted audience. I learned that essays that are not well organized lack flow of information being conveyed and discourage the audience from reading further. I discovered the great need to organize an essay and bring out flow of ideas right from introduction to conclusion in order to establish a direct connection between the essay and the audience. This captures interest of the audience and motivates them to keep reading. I therefore felt that I should apply the same technique as applied in my peer reviewed article and improve on my article’s clarity of ideas.

In revising my essay, I started by revisiting my objective for writing the article in order to get a clear picture of the message that I wanted to convey to my audience. I then started reading my article as I critiqued it with an aim of establishing areas of improvement. I realized that my ideas needed to flow smoothly from one idea to another. The main revision involved linking up ideas to make my essay flow and keep the audience’s interest captured throughout their reading. I revised the essay to ensure that it meets its objectives in conveying required message to audience and to establish a strong connection between my targeted audience and ideas being conveyed as this would make the audience to think along my school of thought. The revised draft was far much better than the original draft, with an excellent flow of ideas. I learned that revising an essay is important because it eliminates grammatical errors and brings out coordinated flow of ideas that keep the audience motivated to continue reading.

The strongest aspect of my essay was the clear convincing ideas that supported my essay objective and kept the audience motivated to read. Furthermore, there was an excellent flow of ideas in my essay that were well coordinated to make the audience evaluate themselves in my school of thought as conveyed by the essay. The weakest aspect of my essay was getting ideas to flow as most of my ideas were initially mixed up. However, this was addressed through revision of the essay. The writing challenges that I frequently ran into while writing this essay was getting the right words to explain ideas and capture the attention of audience. To address this challenge, I wrote one sentence at a time and read it to see if it clearly conveys required message before going to the next sentence. This was however time consuming although it gave my essay the right words and coordination to capture the attention of audience. For the next assignment I prefer to start by reviewing a peer article before I embark on mine as critiquing the peer article will make me write a better essay.