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REFLECTIVE ESSAYS

This brief writing assignment is designed to help you consider and reflect upon important issues related to planning as discussed in the three articles. The exercise of writing a reflective essay is designed to help you consider and reflect upon important issues related to planning and/or your own personal development while further developing your written communication skills. The primary goals for this assignment is to encourage you to

• take the time to think seriously and critically about planning
• explore the significance of personal experiences, events, successes or failures by relating them to broader themes or abstract ideas that illustrate important beliefs and generalizations about life as connected with the articles
• critically evaluate how your personal beliefs, habits, and actions influence your perspective on planning
• express your ideas clearly and persuasively

Webster’s dictionary defines a reflection as thought, idea, or opinion formed as a result of meditation or consideration of some subject matter, idea, or purpose. The goal of reflective writing is to provide a sort of distancing, as if viewing the idea or event for the first time, in order to analyze, evaluate, compare, plan or problem-solve. The best reflective essay will be honest and will reveal your ability to evaluate yourself and others fairly and candidly. Because this essay is intended to express your point of view to a reader, the tone should be somewhat formal without being excessively academic. The personal, chatty tone of a private journal is inappropriate for an audience of your professional peers, but you need not be as formal as you would in a research or technical report.

Guidelines

The reflective essay is not intended to be long or complicated assignment. While we hope that you will spend a lot of time pondering the topic, you should be able to complete the writing in 1-2 hours. The assignment requires no research aside from the original reading citation, unless, of course, you choose to quote someone else as a means of expressing your ideas. The writing should focus primarily on YOU (i.e. your thoughts about or reactions to) rather than on YOUR ENVIRONMENT (actions of or motives ascribed to others). The essays should be clear and concise, logically developed, and in adherence with general conventions of written language (spelling, grammar, development of thought, and proofreading),

The essay must adhere to the writing guidelines that can be found in the “course documents” section of Blackboard.