Essays on Reflection 2

Right, let’s continue our exploration of ‘Essays on Reflection’! 📝✨ Building on what we discussed about ‘Essays on Reflection - I’, ‘Essays on Reflection - II’ dives deeper into how to perfect this kind of writing. It’s all about making your personal views impactful and well-structured, especially when there are no straightforward answers to a topic.

What’s New in ‘Essays on Reflection - II’? 🤔

This second part emphasises perfecting your approach to reflective essays, particularly for higher-level proficiency tests like IELTS Task 2.

Here are the key takeaways:

1. The Importance of Revision 🧐

   • A good essay is impossible without revision. While writing, you might be so focused on the content that small errors – like spelling, punctuation, grammar, or vocabulary mistakes – creep in. These aren’t necessarily due to a lack of knowledge, but rather oversight, haste, or a “slip of hand”.
   • Revision helps these “little things disappear”. It’s rare for a first draft to be perfect; writing improves through trial and error and multiple drafts.

2. Refined Time Management ⏳

   • For an essay with a 30-minute time limit (like a 200-250 word essay), the recommended allocation is precise:
     • 5 minutes for creating a synopsis (thinking before you begin).
     • 20 minutes for writing the essay.
     • 5 minutes for revising.
   • Spending time on the synopsis might seem to reduce writing time, but it actually helps you write “much more easily with greater felicity” and “take fewer words” for the same ideas, ultimately saving time and improving quality.

3. Deepening the Synopsis Content 🧠

   • A synopsis is still your overview or “plan” for the essay, like seeing a whole city from a rooftop without all the details.
   • Beyond defining the topic and outlining instances/evidence, a good synopsis should ideally include:
     • Definition of the topic.
     • Instances, examples, and evidence (both personal and statistical).
     • Dimensions of the topic.
     • Crucially, relevant stories and personal anecdotes.

4. The Power of Stories and Anecdotes 📖

   • This is a significant new element! Including relevant stories and personal anecdotes makes your essay “richer, better, more meaningful than many other essays”. They make your essay unique because “not all of us have the same stories, same anecdotes”.
   • These stories should illustrate a specific point you want to make and can be included in your initial synopsis/plan. You decide which personal anecdotes are suitable for public sharing.

5. Achieving Cohesion with Discourse Markers 🔗

   • An essay must not be a “loose body of isolated sentences” or simply bullet points. Sentences and paragraphs must be connected thematically and logically to make a “coherent reading”.
   • This connection is achieved through “connectors or discourse markers” (also called “discourse Marcus” in source). These are like “glues that put sentences together”.
   • Examples include words like “as,” “for example,” “thus,” “therefore,” “however,” “illustrating,” “nevertheless,” and “regardless”.
   • Proper use of pronouns and prepositions also contributes to making an essay cohesive and readable.

6. Continuous Practice is Key 🏋️‍♀️

   • Writing an essay, like any skill, is “best learned not just by listening to instructions… but by doing”.
   • It involves “trial and error” and producing multiple drafts (second is better than first, third is better still). Don’t worry about length in the first draft; you can “cut out redundant words” and “reduce sentence length” during revision.
   • Consistent practice builds confidence and makes your expressions impactful.

In essence, ‘Essays on Reflection - II’ adds layers of sophistication to your writing process, moving beyond mere content generation to focus on the presentation, coherence, and personal touch that make an essay truly stand out.

Practice Questions 🤔

Scenario: You have 30 minutes to write a reflective essay on the topic: “Should educational institutions promote multilingualism, or focus solely on a dominant global language like English?”

Question 1 (Revision Rationale): You’ve just finished the first draft of your essay. Why is it essential to dedicate time to revision, according to the sources? A) To make the essay longer and reach the word count. B) Because revision always introduces new, interesting ideas. C) To catch “little things” like spelling and grammar errors that occur due to haste or oversight during writing. D) To impress the examiner with how quickly you can make changes.

Question 2 (Adding Depth to Synopsis): Which of the following would best enhance your essay’s richness and meaning if included in your synopsis, as highlighted in ‘Essays on Reflection - II’? A) A list of the top 10 universities for language studies. B) A personal anecdote about a friend who struggled or thrived due to multilingual exposure, illustrating a point about language learning. C) A detailed analysis of the economic benefits of learning a specific language. D) A diagram illustrating the brain’s language processing centers.

Question 3 (Cohesion Strategy): After writing several paragraphs, you notice your essay feels disjointed. Which strategy, explicitly mentioned for achieving cohesion, would be most effective? A) Adding more complex vocabulary. B) Ensuring sentences and paragraphs are connected thematically and logically, often using “connectors or discourse markers”. C) Rewriting the entire essay in a different tense. D) Only using very short, simple sentences.

Solutions ✅

Answer 1: C) Explanation: The sources clearly state that “A good essay is not possible without revision” because writers, while preoccupied with content, may make “mistakes in spelling, punctuation or some minor aspects of grammar or vocabulary” due to “oversight or because of haste or because of slip of hand”. Revision helps these errors “disappear”.

Answer 2: B) Explanation: ‘Essays on Reflection - II’ strongly emphasises that including “relevant stories; stories that illustrate a particular point” and “personal anecdotes” makes an essay “richer, better, more meaningful” and “different”. Options A, C, and D, while potentially relevant to the topic, do not provide the personal, unique flavour that anecdotes offer in a reflective essay.

Answer 3: B) Explanation: The source explicitly advises that “sentences and paragraphs must not remain unconnected, they must make a coherent reading, they must be put together in a cohesive form… connected thematically, and wherever required by what we generally called words that are called connectors or discourse markers”. This “glues that put sentences together” and prevents the essay from becoming “a loose body of isolated sentences”.