In Conversation: Reflective Writing With Lizzie Nunnery
This podcast is an interview with the Royal Literary Fund Fellow, Lizzie Nunnery.
Introduction
In this podcast Lizzie delves into the craft of reflective writing, its benefits, and what you can do to improve your skills to write reflectively. Lizzie is a professional writer and a R.L.F fellow. Following the end of her contract, a new R.L.F fellow will be available from September 2021.
Transcript
Jia: Hi, my name is Jia Xuen from the Library Student Team and I’m here with my colleague, Nandana. As students ourselves, we understand how confusing it can be to be engaged in reflective writing. Today, we have the opportunity to talk with Lizzie Nunnery, on approaching reflective writing and we are seizing this opportunity to seek clarity on several questions that we have on reflective writing. To start with, Lizzie, can you please tell us about your role as an R.L.F. fellow and how you help students to improve their writing skills?
Lizzie: Yes, I’d be glad to. The RLF places professional writers in universities all over Britain. And it’s a really unusual and valuable role, I think.
Jia: Thank you so much, Lizzie. Moving on to today’s topic on reflective writing, can you please explain to us what reflective writing is?
Lizzie: It’s a skill and it’s a process. It’s something that can be so valuable to a student or a writer of any kind. It’s a way of slowing down your research or writing and asking the right reflective questions to make sure you’re achieving your goals which, in some ways, sounds very formal, but actually it can be quite a freeing experience. It can be something which is very enjoyable.
Essentially, reflective writing is a way of ensuring that you’re looking at your work objectively and that you’re always moving forward as a thinker or a writer, always developing your skills.
Jia: So who is reflective writing for and what should I write reflectively about? Do I need to be in a certain state of mind to engage in reflective writing?
Lizzie: It might be that you’re asked to submit reflective writing assignments as part of your course, so in that case, the work would be more directed towards the specific demands of your course and your tutor. Or it might be that you choose to incorporate reflective writing into your study, as something that you do alongside your assignments, as a way of improving those assignments, and ensuring that you’re honing your skills. It’s a way of keeping track of your progress and your journey as a writer and a student. So it can be for a number of people or a number of purposes.
I don’t think that you have to be in a particular state of mind, other than the state of mind you need for all good writing. I talk to all my students about the need to be calm when writing, to turn off the internet if possible, to find time to relax and breathe before you begin to write.
I’d also say that you have to come to the process of reflective writing with honesty and commitment. It’s the sort of thing that won’t work if you retain cynicism about it or if you think that it’s unnecessary and you know everything about yourself and your process already. To some extent, we all think we know ourselves and our work better than we actually do, and sometimes, we’re so close to our writing or research that we’re not the best placed person to judge it, and when approached earnestly, reflective writing allows you to gain that objectivity — to become a better judge of the work or the research that you’re doing.
Jia: Thank you Lizzie, I totally agree with you. Do you have any tips about starting with reflective writing and how do you think a student should approach it? Do you have some ideas on the best way to structure a piece of reflective writing?
Lizzie: There are several different models that have been formalised around reflective writing.
The University of Manchester tends to use the Gibbs reflective model, which is very good.
If you Google those terms, you’ll find it online. Its cyclic nature lends itself well to repeated experiences like essay writing, allowing you to learn and plan from things that either went well or didn’t go well. It covers 6 stages and the first stage is Description. So, you start with a description of your experience. That experience might be a writing process, a course of research or some fieldwork you’ve undertaken. Take time to describe that process in detail. Ask yourself ‘What happened?’, ‘When and where did it happen?’, ‘Who was present?’, ‘What did you want to happen?’ and ‘What was the outcome?’ That leads us to our next heading: Thoughts and Feelings. Ask yourself ‘What were my thoughts and feelings prior to and during the experience?’, ‘What are my thoughts and feelings now?’. If you are thorough and precise in answering those questions, you’ll arrive at a detailed picture of your experience that will open up new understandings both to you and to the reader.
The third stage is Evaluation. Here you have an opportunity to assess in detail what worked and what didn’t work. Aim to be as objective and truthful as possible. You’ll find an evaluation most fruitful if you focus on both the positive and negative aspects of a situation, experience or writing process. What was good or bad? What outcomes met aims or expectations and what outcomes fell short of your ambitions? What did you and other people contribute positively or negatively? So, if you’re reflecting on a writing process, that could be about evaluating feedback, including the input of fellow students or university staff.
This leads neatly to the fourth stage of the reflection: Analysis. This is where you make sense of what has happened. Until this point, you’ve looked closely at the detail of what took place, or what decisions you took as a researcher or writer. At this analytical stage, you extract meaning from that detail. Focus on those statements of what was successful or unsuccessful, and ask “Why is that the case?”. Consider what outside knowledge might help you understand the situation. So this is where you might bring in academic literature to support your argument or help you reach new conclusions.
…which leads us nicely to our fifth stage: Conclusion. Here, you can summarise what you’ve learnt, highlight potential improvements to your learning, actions or process, and arrive at new resolutions. Ask yourself: ‘What did I learn? How might the process have led to more positive outcomes? What different skills and approaches might I employ in future? What did I not do that I could do next time around?’.
This line of thought moves very neatly and naturally into the final stage, which is your Action Plan. Here you lay out in detail what you aim to do differently in a similar situation in future. So if you’re reflecting on an essay writing process, you’re identifying all the different behaviours, attitudes, perspectives, knowledge and skills you might employ next time around. Behaviour and attitude can be particularly useful aspects to investigate, to make sure that you don’t only plan to do things differently, but that you establish strategies to make sure that those changes happen. So useful questions to ask might be: ‘How do I acquire the skills I need?’, ‘How can I ensure that I act differently when approaching similar processes?’ In that way, you’ll be developing strategies that can feed into your future work.
Jia: Thank you so much, Lizzie, on your concrete advice on structuring the piece of reflective writing. So, do you have any advice on how the students should improve their ability to write reflectively?”
Lizzie: Leave yourself enough time and space for the reflective process. It’s about genuinely finding conclusions that are new to you, arriving at ideas that you didn’t previously possess, arriving at new understandings of your work and of yourself, and that’s not easy. It requires you to really push and question yourself and confront insecurities, which none of us like doing.
Note-making or journaling can be really useful. That’s something you can do alongside a process of research, fieldwork or academic writing. It doesn’t have to be very time-consuming. While engaging in the project, you can be noting down key facts, experiences, decisions that you’re making. So that when you come to write that final reflective piece, you have notes that will bring the whole process to life, and reconnect you with the detail of what happened. That can save a lot of time and it can sharpen your thoughts as well.
When you sit down to begin a reflection, gather together any relevant notes you’ve previously made and read through that material calmly. If you’re reflecting on a writing process, it’s also a good idea to read through that written work and view it as objectively as possible.
Before you write anything on screen, my advice would be to hand write some notes. There’s something about the writer’s relationship with the notebook that allows you to be private, even secretive. It takes the pressure off our ideas and language to be brilliant and polished, and allows thoughts to flow. I’d suggest handwriting all the thoughts and feelings that came to you during the project you’re reflecting on. Think back over all the experiences you went through and decisions you made, and scribble them down as roughly as you like, with as little editing as you like — because this is just for you for now, and then you have to make the leap of formulating all those potentially disparate notes into something more concrete, that engages precisely with what happened. At that stage, I’d use the Gibbs model to make a plan, arranging all your ideas under different titles, and expanding your ideas where necessary. You’ll be able to tidy and focus your language at this stage, making sure you’re communicating your ideas with clarity, and at that point, you’ll almost have a finished first draft.
Jia: Yeah, it is very useful indeed. Can I ask just one more question? What are some of the reflective terminologies that the students can use in reflective writing?
Lizzie: It can be really helpful to think about evaluative adjectives. So, some positive examples of those words are: useful, detailed, thorough, influential, innovative, comprehensive. So, in a sentence, that might read ‘this vital skill allowed me to develop my practice…’, ‘vital’ being that evaluative adjective. Or another example might be: ‘this innovative research opened up new possibilities’.
Then, by contrast, consider negative evaluative adjectives, such as limited, inhibited, compromised, problematic.
It can also be useful to consider nouns that describe process or allow us to analyse process e.g. method, approach, technique, insight, skill. It could be a good exercise as a student to try and make your own list of those kinds of words before you begin to work and it can also be helpful in another way, if you’re finding that you’re using the same vocabulary repeatedly as you’re writing your reflection, then perhaps it can be worth exploring the type of language we’ve just looked at, to allow more precision and variety to enter in.
Nandana: “Thank you, Lizzie. On the note of the language use, may I ask how can I ensure my reflective writing has a formal tone and doesn’t use language which is too personal or casual?”
Lizzie: That’s a really good question because a reflection is more personal in tone than most pieces of academic writing you’ll produce. It has to be because it’s about what has happened to you and the choices you’ve made. So an effective piece of reflective writing will find a balance between the personal and the academic. On one hand, you’re using ‘I’ and ‘me’, but that doesn’t mean you’re simply writing a diary. Rather than pondering on what might have happened or might have been, a good reflection is a careful depiction of what happened and what might be done better in future.
I think the best way to ensure the right tone is to ensure the analysis and evaluation sections are sufficiently strong and detailed. Start your reflection with a description of how you thought and felt, but then clearly connect that description with hard evidence of what took place, what outcomes were arrived at and how this was positive or negative. That hard evidence is going to come from several places. You’ll be recalling specific experiences and interactions, particular things that were said or done, perhaps notes or advice you were given. You might be looking back at notes you made during the writing or research process or drawing on academic sources to support the decisions or approaches you took. If you can stick to those rules, the tone will never become purely speculative, or purely opinion-based…and then, in proofreading, you can interrogate the language used and make sure that any vague or casual terms are replaced with precise descriptive terms, so in that way, you’ll ensure that you avoid a register which is too flippant or too conversational.
Nandana: Thank you, Lizzie. I think that’s really helpful advice and something to keep in mind when writing in reflective writing style. Can you give us some indication as to how students can incorporate analysis and evidence in their reflective writing?
Lizzie: It’s about taking that jumping-off point of description and then going much deeper. Looking at Gibbs reflective cycle, description is our starting point. In a sense, you can think of this as the diary. But then scrutinise those events by comparing aims with outcomes. Did the writing or research go as planned? Did you have ideas or intentions that weren’t realised? If not, why not?
For instance, if you’re reflecting on an essay writing process, perhaps you had ambitions to analyse many more texts or to proofread more thoroughly, but in reality, you didn’t meet those aims. If you focus the work in that way, you’ll make sure that the reflection has the right level of depth and complexity, and you’ll open up opportunities to bring in academic literature to support your discussion.
Nandana: On that specific note, can you give us an insight as to how reflective writing can help us achieve our short-term and long-term goals?
Lizzie: Reflective writing is such a gift in this way. It allows us to think about who we want to be, as students and as writers, and gives us an arena to think about the best version of ourselves in these contexts. Perhaps, at the beginning of a writing or research process, you could note down your immediate and short-term goals for the work, to ensure that you don’t lose sight of them, and you might also want to think about the long term at that point. What are your goals as a student or academic, or as a researcher or creative writer? Our short-term and long-term goals are always linked together. We want to deliver certain kinds of work because in the long-term we want to be a certain kind of student or writer or even a certain kind of person.
If we use a reflection as a space to be really honest, we can move on enormously through negative analysis, which sounds strange, but it can be a way to genuinely grow as students and people. For example, if a student aims to be organised and efficient, but acknowledges that they are bad at managing time, then they’re able to work out strategies to deal with that challenge, and overcome it. In that way, they can become a more reliable person and can enjoy their work more. That’s a simple example of how we can compare aims to outcomes and allow this comparison to lead to positive change.
Nandana: Thank you, Lizzie, for giving a wonderful insight as to how reflective writing can be helpful for us. What other skills can I develop from reflective writing, apart from analysis and evaluation?
Lizzie: Reflective writing can help us find more clarity in our use of language. It encourages us to spend time with our choices of vocabulary, and our modes of expression, and be rigorous in assessing the effectiveness of our writing style. It can lead us to ask questions like: ‘Is that the right phrase to clearly communicate the idea I have in mind?’ or ‘Am I approaching grammar and punctuation as confidently or skilfully as I’d like?’. The aim in all academic writing is to find the simplest way to say a complicated thing, and reflective writing does really help with that.
More broadly, reflective writing allows us to view ourselves and our work with constructive criticism and that, in turn, can inform our ability to learn from others and adapt through experience, which is an invaluable skill in work and in life.
Nandana: Thank you! Can you point us towards a good example that kind of inculcates all the ideas we have talked til now?
Lizzie: There are lots of good examples online. If students take it upon themselves to search, they’ll find a lot of useful material quite quickly. I’ve come across a good example that does everything that we’ve been discussing. It begins with a description of fieldwork carried out in Rwanda, then goes to a deep and insightful level about what might have been done better, what was frustrating, and what processes or behaviours were less successful, and it brings in scholarly examples to support statements which, in some ways, is the most difficult aspect of reflective writing. So I’ll share that link with this podcast. It’s well worth looking at and it’s not too long either, so you’ll absorb it quite quickly.
Nandana: Thank you very much, Lizzie, for answering all our questions on reflective writing. We are now more confident about our ability to write reflectively. We hope other students listening to this have also learned one or two things about reflective writing. Don’t forget, you can find more podcasts and learning resources by going to the university’s library website and visiting the My Learning Essentials webpage. Good luck and thank you!
Further support
- The sample reflective writing essay that Lizzie mentions in the podcast
- University of Manchester Library website for learning resources
- My Learning Essentials webpage
