In reflective writing, it’s common to connect personal experience to specific content from your paper/course. Your lecturer may give you assignments that involve showing:
Connecting personal experience to specific content from your paper/course involves:
These features may be specific to one part of your assignment, or spread throughout, depending on your assignment instructions.
Your ability to relate and match experiences to theory shows deep understanding of content. The concrete details of personal experiences may be your own or experiences recorded in research (depending on your assignment question).
One advantage of example 3 is that you can connect different theories (or different parts of the same theory) to one experience/example. In all three examples, there is a balance of theory and experience, and language is used to make clear links.
Your lecturer may specify a particular reflective writing model for you to use. Prompt questions can help you get started.
The notion of the ‘wave’ is an adaption of theory that draws on the dimension of Semantics in Legitimation Code Theory (Maton, 2013).
Maton, K. (2013). Making semantic waves: A key to cumulative knowledge-building. Linguistics and Education, 24(1), 8–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2012.11.005