The Reflection Statement
Purpose and stance
The Reflection Statement (typically 1,500 words) is a critical companion to the Major Work, not a plot summary or a diary of feelings. It must demonstrate authorial control: that you understand what you made, why you made it that way, and how your reading and drafting shaped it. The examiner reads it to see whether the sophistication visible in the work is intentional - recoverable, articulable, defensible.
Concepts to command
Understand intention versus effect (what you meant versus what the text does), intertextuality (named, specific debts to other texts and traditions), form and genre (the conventions you adopt, subvert or refuse), and process (drafting decisions, feedback, revision). A strong statement moves between three registers: the conceptual (the idea and its stakes), the formal (how the work's shape serves the idea), and the reflective (what changed and why across drafts).
Traps in questions
Common failures: retelling the plot instead of analysing it; vague influence ("I was inspired by many authors") without naming texts or explaining what was taken; overclaiming significance you cannot evidence in the work; and ignoring the work's weaknesses - a candid account of a problem you solved reads as maturity, not failure. Another trap is treating research as a bibliography; research must be shown transforming the composition.
Worked example
A weak sentence: "I wanted to explore identity and belonging." A strong one: "Following Judith Wright's use of the elegy to mourn dispossession, I inverted the form so that the land, not the settler, speaks the lament - a decision made in draft three after feedback that my earlier narrator had colonised the grief she described." Note how the second names a precursor, specifies a formal move, and dates the revision.
Rule of thumb
Every paragraph should answer: what did I do, why, and what does it reveal?