I wrote recently about the difference between reflection and reflexivity. Reflection looks back at what you have done and asks what you can learn from it. Reflexivity turns the lens on you, the person doing the work, and on the conditions under which you are making knowledge. 

What do you actually do with this distinction when you sit down to write? 

Here is one strategy. It asks you to make two passes over a piece of your own writing. The first pass is reflection. The second is reflexivity. If you do them in this order, you will see that reflection has you reading closely, making the harder questions in the second pass easier, because you are already looking and thinking critically.

Start by choosing a piece of your own writing. A draft chapter, an article you are revising, a section that will not behave. Open it or print it. You are going to read it twice, with a different set of questions each time.

The first pass is reflection. Read the piece thinking about writing as craft. Focus your attention on the page. Ask yourself:

• What was I trying to do here, and does the writing do it?
• Where does it move well, and where does it stall?
• What did I work out by writing this that I did not know before I started?
• What would I change if I drafted it again?

Then an activity. 

Choose two places in the writing. One where the writing works and you can say why. One where it stalls. Write, next to the stall, a sentence about what the problem is, not how to fix it. Naming the problem plainly is often enough to show you the fix.

So far this is reflection. You keep your eyes on the writing and the page. 

Now turn the lens around to yourself. The second pass is reflexivity. It’s the same piece of writing, but you have different questions. This time you are asking about yourself and the position you are writing from:

• Whose voice am I writing in, and which scholars’ insights am I borrowing? Why those? What perspectives have I decided not to use and why? 
• Who is the reader I am imagining, and what readers have I decided to leave out? Why those?
• Where am I setting myself up as the one who knows, and what does that do to the people I am writing about?
• Am I writing in a way that reproduces what I am arguing against? Am I writing an inaccessible paragraph about widening access, or packing a dense clause around a point about concision?
• What does my prior learning and experience let me see in this material, and what does it stop me seeing because I have learned to treat it as ordinary?

The associated activity is smaller. But harder. 

Take one paragraph and ask who is served by the way it is written. If the honest answer is mostly you, your standing, your CV, mark it. That is a paragraph to rethink.

You need both passes because they do different work. Reflection makes the writing better in its own terms. Reflexivity asks whether those terms are the right ones, and who they serve. A draft can be well made and still do something that you might not defend if its assumptions were made explicit. The first pass will not catch that. The second one can.

Reflection tells you whether the writing works. Reflexivity tells you what it is doing and for whom. If you run them in that order on the next academic text you are stuck on, it might help you to see what each pass turns up.

This activity works well with someone else. Swap drafts, or better, swap the notes you each made. A colleague can often see the borrowed voice or the imagined reader faster than you can, because they are not the one who wrote the original piece. We are all a little bit blind to our own defaults. Both reflection and reflexivity can help.

Photo by Yeshi Kangrang on Unsplash