What is a reflective essay?

A reflective essay is a very broad term. Any essay is ultimately in a way reflective. Whether one is writing an argumentative essay, an academic essay or a research essay, a photo essay or a contemplative essay or even a blog post essay, it is ultimately a reflective essay. However, a reflective essay is more specifically used to denote essays written as a recapitulative exercise. Such essays can be academic essays written after the end of a course or after the end of modules in a course in order to reflect on certain portions of the curriculum that have been taught. A reflective essay can also be essays written by employees after the end of modules of work where they have to look back at the work they did and present their thoughts on the work experience, the project and the fellow workers among other things.
In a reflective essay of any kind, one needs to think primarily about one?s experiences and beliefs. It is this thinking that should come through in the reflective essay. The essay is supposed to reflect the thoughts of the writer on a particular subject. A high school essay can be of varying length. What it demands primarily is looking back at something from the point of view of the writer. This demands for a certain degree of both objectivity as well as subjectivity. A writer must not write only about her or his experience in the process but also include some material about the work in general without the reflection being coloured or influenced by her or his experience.
A reflective essay when it is not part of an academic exercise or written as part of the review of a process by an employee, is often tinted with nostalgia. Since a reflective essay entails looking back at the past, the reflective essay is replete with no longer present memories of the past. Such essays are intensely personal and subjective as opposed to academic essays or employee essays which are written as part of one?s work and are more objective and have less to do with personal emotions.
A reflective essay is therefore a label used to denote two major types of essays. The objective, impersonal, history essay can be an argumentative, critical essay, an academic essay or an essay written by employees after the end of a module of work. Such essays tend to be similar irrespective of who writes if all of them write about the same work. The subjective, personal, reflective essay is a contemplative essay and is too varied to be divided into subcategories. Such essays tend to be different for every different writer but each writer tends to repeat a lot of material in a lot of contexts and in a lot of reflective essays. These are the differences between the two major types of reflective essays and present the two major strains of reflective essays. In total, they form one of the most basic characteristics of all essays.