The Reflective Essay
This reflective statement is an opportunity to show your growth as a writer by walking your reader through some of your thinking about the assignments from the course. You will discuss your writing through the lenses of specific core values to demonstrate to your reader how you understand and are applying concepts from the course. There is a link to the Core Values folder on the lefthand menu bar.
Note that you are being asked to consider the course as a whole, including smaller assignments, in-class activities, and even early drafts of essays. Feel free to talk through challenges you faced and what you might do differently if you had more time. For this statement, the quality of the reflection is what matters: that you offer insights into your own writing process and demonstrate an understanding of the core values, even if you haven’t mastered those values.
You should see this as an opportunity to “prove” that you are making effective and rhetorically savvy moves in this course. In other words, you are trying to demonstrate your own success. However, it can also be important to note places where you are still developing these skills.
Be sure that you are explaining each core value in your own voice (to show that you understand it), and providing specific examples of how you met it in the course.
A reflective statement that is of minimal passing quality will identify specific passages from assignments in the course and analyze them; however, a reflective statement that is of excellent quality will talk through the specific informed, rhetorical choices that the student made through specific portions of assignments in the course. By contrast, a weak or insufficient reflective statement will make little to no reference to the assignments in the course, or those references will be tangential or vague.

To recap:
For each Core Value, you should:
-translate the entire Core Value into your own words, to demonstrate your understanding
-Explain the importance of the Core Value as a writerly/academic practice
-give a specific example of where and how you met/demonstrated the Core Value in this course