Reflective Writing
From
my last blog you can see that I initally had trouble getting started writing a
journal for the course, which I felt was unusual for me as I do write my own
personal diary now and then. I feel as I had be instructed to write I found
myself thinking too much about what I was meant to write and trying to work out
if it will be meaningful.
However
after reading the Reader 2 I have gained a greater depth of knowledge on
reflection and have come to understand that what I write now will becoming
relevant and meaningful when I reflect back.
Knowing
that my journal is private and is not an assessed piece of work or open to
everyone to see has helped me to get involved with the task of writing in
different styles.
When
I was studying for my Diploma in Musical Theatre we had to do contextual
studies which meant we had to write every night about our classes and
corrections, this became habit to do this every evening, so I am used to
keeping a journal so I found that it wasn’t the writing I found difficult it
was finding the motivation to write down things into my journal, I overcame
this my allowing myself to write at any time of the day and when ideas and
thoughts jump into my head I can just jot them down.
I
found that naturally I was writing in a descriptive way and writing my Initial
Reflection. I feel that I do this already because the reason I write diaries is
to record the day’s events and my feelings, I find it a good way and letting my
emotions and feelings out onto the page.
The
first different way of writing I tried was the List. This was not very
successful for me as I found myself getting more and more confused and writing
lots of different lists and everything became out of order and reading back
through that entry of my diary I cannot make clear sense of it and I feel that
this would affect the accuracy of my reflection. I found it impersonal as I consider
writing lists for shopping or ‘to remember’ or ‘to do’ lists.
I
then went on to try the Evaluation approach to writing, to an extent I was
already doing this naturally in my writing however it did force me to dig
deeper into what I had learnt and reflect on the situation in more detail. I liked
this and I think I am going to try and evaluate more in my Journal throughout
the course.
Moving
on to Graphs, Charts and Diagrams, this was not very successful to say the
least. I am not a visual learner and spent a lot of time wondering where to get
started on this. I started off my doing a graph of my days events and reflecting
back on it now it doesn’t really make sense to me and I feel that if I were to
look back at it by the end of the course I will have no idea on how to reflect
on that days events. Lets just say artistic talents lie in Dancing rather than
drawing! I found that my mind did not want to work this way!
What
if? This way of writing transported me to an idealistic world, I felt like a
daydreamer. However it was very interesting and made good use of my
imagination. However writing what could have happened rather than what did
didn’t really make much sense to me. Maybe I will try this again later in my
journal writing.
Finally
writing in ‘Another View’, I found this interesting but like the ‘What if’ I
felt that it was using my imagination. It did make me think how people perceive
events differently and what impact you have had on that person was quite an
interesting point to think on. However for my personal reflection I do not feel
that it is the best form of writing for me to continue with.
To conclude I enjoyed trying out all these writing
styles and I think I will try some of them again throughout the duration of the
course, however I do feel that Description, Initial Reflection and Evaluation
are the best writing styles for me. This exercise has really made me reflect on
the way in which I learnt and has opened my eyes into different styles.
