Reflective writing: how to do it properly

The 20/80 rule

Description earns almost no marks. It is context, and context should be efficient.

Test your draft: highlight every sentence that reports what happened. If more than a fifth of the page is highlighted, you are narrating, and the fix is to compress those paragraphs to two sentences and spend the recovered words on analysis.

Gibbs' reflective cycle, stage by stage

Gibbs (1988) is the most widely taught model, and its six stages map neatly onto headings.

• Description — what happened. Brief, factual, anonymised.
• Feelings — what you were thinking and feeling at the time, honestly.
• Evaluation — what was good and bad about the experience.
• Analysis — the heart of it. What sense can you make of it, and what does the literature say? This is where citations live.
• Conclusion — what else could you have done.
• Action plan — what you will specifically do if it arises again.

Other models, and when to use them

Driscoll's What? / So what? / Now what? is cleaner for short reflections of 500–800 words.

Rolfe et al. uses the same three questions with more analytical depth, and suits postgraduate work.

Kolb's experiential learning cycle is preferred when the focus is on how you learn rather than on a single event.

Schön's reflection-in-action versus reflection-on-action is useful in professional practice contexts where the distinction between thinking during and after matters.

Reflective writing topics that work

If your brief lets you choose, pick an event with genuine tension. Reflections on things that went smoothly have nothing to analyse.

• A time your assumption about someone turned out to be wrong.
• A decision made under time pressure that you would now make differently.
• Feedback you initially resisted and later accepted.
• A team conflict and your own contribution to it.
• A moment when professional guidelines and practical reality pulled in different directions.
• A skill you thought you had until you had to use it under observation.

Writing in first person without losing register

'I' is required — reflection without a subject is not reflection. What stays formal is everything else: no contractions, no slang, and claims about practice still supported by literature.

Compare: 'I felt really thrown by this' becomes 'I found this destabilising, which Bolton (2018) identifies as a common response when tacit knowledge is made explicit'. Same honesty, academic register.

Action plans that earn marks

'I will communicate better' is not an action plan. It is a wish.

'I will use SBAR structure for every handover during my next placement block, and ask my mentor for feedback on two handovers per week' is an action plan: specific, observable and time-bound.