The most important thing you need to realize is that revising your reflection essay and feature article takes time. The form of the essay allows you a certain kind of freedom in terms of what you want to say, but the skill that this course is teaching you is how to make this freedom work alongside a very clear sense of the parts of the essay (beginning-middle-end), what each part should contain (check your rubric and sample essays), and the tone you might consider taking (check the sample essays).
How To Revise The Reflection
(1) Check the rubric. What does it tell you about how to get higher marks? Try and revise based on that.
(2) The reflection is based on experience, which means that both need to appear in your essay. Many of you just talked about experience without doing the reflection; some of you did the reflection without actually being clear about the experience. Make sure you do both in the essay.
(3) Look at the sample reflections. All of them have introductions that give us a sense of what the authors have already realized about the subject matter or experience. And then they move on to the actual experience in the body of the essay to actually provide us with a context for that realization. And then they conclude by expanding on that realization, as they reflect on the bigger meaning of the experience.
(4) I know that it’s difficult to write about oneself. But the critical thinking module and the critical thinking videos actually give you a set of questions that you can start from so that you don’t just end up doing a diary / journal kind of essay.
How to Revise the Feature Article
(1) Check the rubric. Revise based on what it says.
(2) Read the sample essays. You will notice that there were very many kinds of essays there, and that was supposed to make it easier for you to fashion a feature despite the limitations of the pandemic. But many of you still veered away from those samples, which is fine if what you ended up with was a feature. For some of you the feature essay turned out like reflections, or opinion pieces, or serious essays. None of those is what the feature’s about.
(3) Check your tone. All the sample features take on a light tone. This is what we talked about in class, it is what is in the videos and modules.
(4) Check the form. The feature is supposed to “feature a subject.” It is your voice, as you tell a story, and of course it has your perspective on the subject, but the focus is not you. Make sure you keep the focus on your subject.
(5) If your feature is one that lists down the “best movies” or the “best songs” you need to be sure that these are specific enough and clear enough. Specificity means that it’s a focused enough subject so that the list you put together makes sense right away. Ask yourself: what do these different things have in common, why are you putting them together in a list? Clarity means that you can actually tie together these different things that make up the list. Many of you are not really clear about why you’ve chosen the different subjects you’ve chosen to put together your features. If you’re not clear, then it won’t be clear to your readers either.
(6) Make sure you have a conclusion. Many of you just left your essays hanging by not coming up with an appropriate conclusion that is all about your own perspective and realization about your subject. This is where you are able to tell your readers what you’ve learned or why this subject is important. The conclusion is as crucial as the rest of your essay.
Lastly, it’s obvious which ones of you did not quite read the modules and / or watch the videos seriously, and which ones didn’t read the sample essays. Do all of that before you revise and I assure you that you can get better marks.
Make sure to follow Final Submission guidelines here.
Good luck!
