Reflecting on your composing choices: WACE Year 12 English Unit 3
“Reflect on and explain the deliberate choices made in composing a text and their intended effect on an audience”
You need to explain the deliberate choices you made when composing a text, justifying them in the same analytical language you use on other writers' work, by connecting your intended context, purpose and audience to the specific techniques you chose and the effect you wanted those techniques to have.
What this dot point is asking
Reflective writing is the bridge between composing and analysing. Many school assessment tasks pair an original composition with a reflective statement that explains it, and the reflection is marked on whether you can talk about your own writing the way you talk about a studied text. This dot point asks you to turn the analytical vocabulary of the course back onto your own choices, which proves you composed with control rather than by accident.
Reflection justifies, it does not narrate
The single most important distinction is between narrating and justifying. Narrating tells the reader what you did: I started with a description of the beach, then I introduced the character. Justifying explains why the choice serves your purpose: I opened with the emptied beach so the absence would establish the loss before the character names it, sparing the piece an explicit statement of grief. A marker can reward a justified choice because it demonstrates intention. A narrated choice demonstrates only memory.
Anchor every reflection to context, purpose and audience
A reflection has a spine when it keeps returning to the brief you set yourself. State the context, purpose and audience your composition was built for, then justify each major choice as serving them. A choice that cannot be tied back to purpose or audience is hard to defend, which is itself a useful diagnostic when you are deciding what to keep in the reflection.
Use the analytical chain on your own work
Reflect on your composition exactly as you would analyse a published text: name the feature, explain the choice, argue the intended effect. The only difference is that you can speak to intention directly. This lets you write sentences no analysis of another writer could, because you genuinely know why the choice was made.
Justifying a composing choice
Because my brief was a memoir extract for an adult literary readership, with the purpose of conveying childhood embarrassment without sentimentality, I chose to filter the scene through a present-tense child narrator whose vocabulary stays deliberately small. The short, plain sentences are a deliberate constraint: by denying the narrator the adult words for shame, I wanted the reader to supply the emotion the child cannot name, so the feeling arrives by inference rather than statement. I also withheld any retrospective adult voice, even though it would have been easier to explain the scene, because the explanation would have told the reader what to feel and broken the restraint the purpose demanded. The flat final line, where the child simply notes that no one looked up, was chosen to end on absence rather than resolution, leaving the embarrassment unredeemed and therefore, I hoped, more true to how the memory actually sits.
The paragraph never narrates the plot of the composition. Every sentence ties a specific choice to the purpose and audience and argues the intended effect, which is reflection done at the level the dot point rewards.
Be honest about constraint and revision
Strong reflections can also discuss what was cut and why. Explaining that you removed an explanatory sentence because it told rather than showed demonstrates editorial control, which markers value as much as the original choices. Reflection is partly a record of judgement, and judgement includes restraint.
How this maps to the exam
While the external Composing section asks for the composition itself rather than a separate reflection, the reflective skill is heavily assessed in school-based composing tasks, which make up half your course mark. The discipline of justifying choices also makes you a more deliberate composer under exam conditions, because you write while already anticipating the defence of each choice.
The most common reflection error is a retelling of the composition: first I did this, then I did that. A play-by-play earns little, because it shows no intention. For every choice you mention, state the purpose it served and the effect you intended. Replace "I used short sentences and then a long one" with "I used clipped sentences to enact the character's panic, then released into one long sentence at the resolution so the syntax itself would feel like a breath finally let out."
Exam-style questions
Questions in the style of SCSA exam questions on this dot point, each with a worked answer. They are written by ExamExplained unless tagged "Past paper"; the year shows the paper a question is modelled on.
WACE 2022-style10 marksSchool-based composing task (reflective component). Write a reflective statement explaining the deliberate choices in a text you have composed and their intended effect on your audience.Show worked answer →
A reflective statement is marked on justification, not narration of what you wrote.
Plan: state the context, purpose and audience your composition served, then justify each major choice against them.
Body: for every choice you mention, name the feature, explain the choice, and argue the intended effect, using the same analytical chain you apply to studied texts. The difference is you can speak to intention directly.
Strong move: discuss what you cut and why, since explaining restraint demonstrates editorial control markers value.
Markers reward justified choices tied to purpose and audience and penalise a play-by-play retelling of the composition. (This is a school-based task; the external Composing section asks for the composition itself, but the reflective discipline is heavily assessed across the course.)
WACE 2023-style8 marksSchool-based composing task. Explain how two specific stylistic choices in your composition were designed to position your intended reader.Show worked answer →
An 8 mark reflective response should justify exactly two choices in depth rather than list many shallowly.
For each choice: name it precisely (a syntactic pattern, a controlled register, a withheld explanation), state the purpose it served, and argue the positioning it was designed to create for the named reader.
Tie both choices back to one controlling intention so the reflection reads as a coherent account of craft.
Markers reward depth over breadth, the intention-to-technique-to-effect chain, and a reader kept named throughout. Penalise narration of plot and vague claims of effect.