How do you explain and justify the choices you made in your own writing?
Reflect on your own composing process, explaining and justifying the choices you made for audience and purpose.
How to write reflective commentary in TCE English: analysing and justifying your own composing choices for audience and purpose, and showing growth as a writer.
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What this dot point is asking
Alongside the texts you create, the course asks you to reflect on your own composing process. A reflective statement or commentary turns the analytical skills you use on other writers' work back onto your own. Instead of explaining how a published author built an effect, you explain how you built one, and why you made the choices you did. Done well, this demonstrates that your creative and persuasive decisions were deliberate rather than accidental, which is exactly what raises a piece from competent to controlled.
The most common misunderstanding is to confuse reflection with retelling or with feelings. A weak reflection narrates the process (first I chose a topic, then I wrote a draft, then I edited it) or reports emotions (I found it hard but I am happy with it). Neither analyses anything. A strong reflection treats your own text as an object and asks the same questions you would ask of any text: what choices were made, why, and to what effect on the intended audience. The verb that matters is justify. You are arguing that your choices served your purpose.
Anchoring reflection in specific choices
Generalities sink reflective writing. Saying that you tried to make your writing engaging tells a marker nothing. Point instead to a specific choice and explain its job. You might explain that you opened with a short, fragmented sentence to unsettle the reader before the calmer description that follows, because your purpose was to make ordinary suburbia feel quietly threatening. That sentence does real reflective work: it names a precise choice, ties it to purpose, and explains the intended effect. Aim to do this for several of your most important decisions rather than gesturing at the whole piece.
Audience and purpose should anchor every justification. A choice is not good or bad in the abstract; it is effective or ineffective for a particular reader and goal. The same colloquial tone that suits a blog aimed at teenagers would undercut a formal reflective essay. When you justify a choice, name the audience and purpose it served, so the marker sees that you understand writing as a set of decisions calibrated to a context.
Showing growth and judgement
The strongest reflections also show critical distance from your own work. It is more impressive to identify a choice that did not fully work, and explain what you would do differently, than to claim everything succeeded. Acknowledging a redraft you made, a passage you cut, or an effect you did not quite achieve demonstrates judgement and growth. Reflection is not self promotion; it is honest, evidence based analysis of your own craft.
When you draft a reflection, pull two or three of your most deliberate choices and justify each in a short paragraph. Depth on a few real decisions always beats a vague tour of the whole piece.
Exam-style practice questions
Practice questions written in the style of TASC exam questions on this dot point, with worked answer explainers. The year tag is the paper they imitate, not the source.
TCE 202210 marksFolio (Creating Texts). Write a reflective commentary on a text you have created, explaining and justifying your key composing choices in relation to audience and purpose.Show worked answer →
A high 10 mark commentary justifies choices analytically; it is not a diary of the process or of feelings.
Plan: choose two or three of your most deliberate decisions rather than touring the whole piece.
For each: name the precise choice (a fragmented opening sentence, a withheld revelation, a colloquial register), state the audience and purpose it served, and explain the intended effect.
Show judgement: identify a choice that did not fully work and what you would do differently, which demonstrates growth.
Use the test "why did this choice serve my audience and purpose?" for every point.
Markers reward justification tied to audience, purpose and effect, and penalise narrating the timeline (first I, then I) or reporting emotions.
TCE 20218 marksFolio (Creating Texts). Explain and justify one significant structural or stylistic choice in a piece you have composed.Show worked answer →
An 8 mark answer goes deep on a single choice rather than skimming several.
Open by naming the one choice precisely (for example, delaying a revelation to the final paragraph).
Justify it against purpose and audience: what you wanted the reader to do or feel, and why this choice achieves it.
Strengthen with evidence of process: a redraft, a peer comment, an effect you adjusted, which shows the choice was deliberate.
Markers reward a precise choice justified against purpose with evidence of redrafting, and penalise a vague claim that the choice made the piece engaging.