1) Select a specific incident, event, experience, project, etc. that strikes you as particularly interesting or that highlights a personal quality.

2) What happened? Fill in enough context to give the event meaning. Answer the question in a
way that makes sense to you. Don't interpret here - just tell the story.

3) What might this mean? There is no one answer. Explore the possible meanings rather than determining the one true meaning.

4) What implications are there for future practice? Consider how your practice might change given any new understandings that have emerged.

Questions like these get you to stop and think about what you were involved in. Writing about a specific experience and what it meant to you is reflective writing. Notice the emphasis on YOU! In the long run you should recognize that it is important for you to learn from your experiences.

Sometimes the hardest thing is figuring out a way to get started. Here are some places to focus your thinking around. Select one or two and write your thoughts about them:

• The assessment others made of your work, especially if you were given a formal written evaluation.
  
• Contributions that the experience made to your academic (and maybe career) development, goals, and growth as a person and a professional.
  
• Contributions of the experience to your selection of future coursework, either because you foresaw new needs due to the experience or because a classmate, teacher, or co-worker made recommendations.
  
• Assessment of which courses you completed that were the most or the least applicable to this class or other experience. Note specific courses and principles studied in these courses. This helps you build a thread connecting
  your various experiences here at Penn State.
  
• Noteworthy distinctions between your education and on-the-job experience, if applicable.
  
• Whether the course fits in well with your chosen major and any minors or specialties you are pursuing.
  
• Your level of personal satisfaction with the class and whether or not you would recommend it to others.
  
• Your assessment of how the class could be improved for others.

Remember, don't just summarize what happened. That is the descriptive part. In this reflection piece explain what it means to you, how it came to pass, or what affect it has had on you.

Reflective Narrative Style

In terms of style, your readers will be happier if your information is clear and your ideas fluid. Therefore, as you compose your annotation or analysis, employ the following stylistic benchmarks:

• Use an honest, upbeat, sincere tone, when you assess the experience's value to you personally.
  
• Favor short paragraphs over long ones. Short paragraphs tend to be focused; long ones tend to be cumbersome.
  
• Consciously build your paragraphs around topic sentences, even very simple sentences such as "My daily activities fell into three categories." Your readers will be thankful that you spelled your paragraph topics out clearly, and it will help keep you focused as well.
  
• Selectively use transition words at the beginnings of pivotal sentences and paragraphs, remembering that transition words provide simple ways for you to guide the reader's thinking. Opening a sentence with a word such as "Specifically" tells the reader that you are about to provide elaboration, while a transition such as "Clearly" implies writer contemplation.
  
• Take advantage of the most powerful punctuation marks - the semicolon, colon, and dash-to present material efficiently.
  
• Pay special attention to subject/verb agreement and verb tense, the two most common sentence-level problems in technical writing.

It is important for you to rely on specifics, not generalities when assessing the value of an experience and what you have learned from it. Avoid generic unsupported conclusions such as "The internship was a positive experience for me and it was very beneficial too." Instead, present evidence (which is already present in your portfolio, after all) to prove your claims-provide examples, scenarios, lists, names, dates, emotions, labels, terminology. Do not skimp on detail here!