Task 2b Reflective Writing

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.