Auto-Ethnography

Auto-Ethnography
Vincent Verduzco
Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi

Abstract

The methods of writing vary in people almost as much as fingerprints are different. This paper, hence the title, studies the way that I write. The sample of writing the study is being conducted on is an essay that I wrote using a prompt which asks the effects that technology has had on society over the years; with an emphasis on the recent years, meaning the past ten to fifteen years with the start of the internet. The paper is coded using methods writing, talking, reading, planning and editing. I steered my study towards that of Perl (1970) who conducted a study on under skilled college students and their writing process.

Whether they know it or not, each individual has a process of writing that they follow every time they write. Whether it is planning, outlining or just “going with the flow” every single person has one. In order to figure out what mine was, I did a study on me writing a paper on the effects of technology on society. I am not in biology so I didn’t use a CPR assignment I just used an SAT practice prompt. I recorded myself writing on using the camera on my iMac and what I found was actually pretty interesting. When I write I use no initial outline or planning before I actually put pen to paper. It took me around three hours to finish the paper but only about an hour and a half of the time was me writing. The rest of the time I was laying my head on the desk, messing with my phone, or reading everything I had written so far. I did that a lot, I read over and over what I wrote to make sure it sounded okay and then I ended up editing a pretty .because most of it was written, read, and then edited, so I had to find a way to code it with all three methods. I feel like I resembled the writing style of Tony, whom Perl (1970) studied in her experiment. He, along with me, couldn’t write long without stopping and rereading and then having to talk about what he read and then thought about what to read next and then eventually got back to writing. This is what took me so long to write; because like I said only about half of the time I spent at the computer was spent on writing the actual paper. After looking at my recording a few times I noticed how it tied in to Rose’s (1980) study on writer’s block. The rule I struggled with the most during the assignment was writing in a style which I am not used to writing in. We, well at least I am, are learning how to write in APA format and it is completely new to me which makes me constantly nervous and skeptical about going any further because I believe everything I have written so far is complete, how do you say, “crap on paper”. Another huge problem that I faced was that I do not plan when I write, I simply write what I think at that moment, which would explain why I reread and edit my paper so many times. I also write very fast when I do have a steady writing period, which causes some of what I write to not make sense out loud although it did in my head. The reason for this is when I think of an idea it is a very large idea and they come up with many examples and different literary devices. Once I stop, regardless of what it is for I completely lose that train of thought and begin writing about something completely different and lose the potential my previous idea had. There were only two instances in my essay that I marked planning, and that was a very loose name for it. Most of the time I spent “planning” was actually spent thinking of words or phrases that sounded smarter or better than what I already had written or was about to write. I always think that it is so much easier to live an algorithmic life but, in fact, I live very heuristically. I don’t have a lot of rules, especially when I write which is another problem in it of itself. When I got to this class I was given a set of rules for the APA style of writing that I had to follow and the rules were pretty specific. So with all of these writing methods the book would point me to the non-blocker’s list but in fact my recording showed that I am a huge blocker. Moving to the study which Berkenotter (1983) executed, I find that my writing style is very different than that of Murray’s (1983). It showed almost half of the time spent editing in the editorial talking about himself as the subject of the study; whereas I spent little to no time revising this ethnography and a significantly larger amount of time editing my actual college composition or essay. In conclusion, I felt that my writing style needs to be improved a great deal in order to get to the point I need to for college and to be able to use my time wisely enough to actually get more than one thing done in a day. Hopefully with the observations I have made, I can think about them while I am writing my next assignment and make it that much easier.

Key
*Reading*
Writing
***Talking***
Planning
Editing