University of Memphis / ENGL 1010

Autoethnographic Essay

Purpose

The purpose of your final writing assignment for the course is to reflect upon your writing process.To do this, you should consider what you read in this course alongside your reflections from each major writing assignment. Reflection allows us to make connections and build knowledge, and thus the primary purpose of this course is to help you build your knowledge about the writing processes that work best for you, so that when you write in other courses, you can make conscious decisions about your writing process. Your textbook explains: 

For this assignment, you will conduct a study similar tothose conducted by Perl, Neto, and Berkenkotter, but instead of looking at someone else, you will examine yourself and your own writing processes and write an autoethnography in which you describe them… Your purpose is to try to learn some things about your actual writing practices that you might not be aware of and to reflect on what you learn using the terms and concepts you’ve read about in this chapter. (873)

You can approach data collection in two ways: 

1. You can record yourself (via audio or video or screen recording) as you write for an assignment. Then you can watch or listen to that recording to better understand what happens when you write. 

2. You can return to the writing reflections you completed in class after you submitted each of the first three assignments and use those reflections to compose a cohesive autoethnography. 

Process

Data Collection: 

• Review the Threshold Concepts about writing processes on page 707. How does your own writing process confirm or challenge these concepts? 

• Plan Ahead: Think about the writing you have due in other classes (or this one). Consider recording yourself talking about what you are doing as your write or use screen recording to actually recordwhat is happening on your screen. 

• Gather your major writing assignments from the semester: The Literacy Narrative, the Discourse Community Analysis and the Writing Research Essay.  Reread them and jot down anything you think might be important when discussing your writing processes. 

• Receive your “Goals for English 1010” homework and your autoethnographic reflections from your instructor and reread them. Look for constants in your writing process. Did anything change about your writing process from the beginning of class until now?  

• Look back through the textbook and consider the effect that the readings had upon your writing decisions.

Analysis: 

As Giles notes, in “Reflective Writing and the Revision Process: What Were You Thinking?,” you should think about each of the essays that you have written this semester in the context of the rhetorical situation each one presented. 

• Use the Reflections to consider how your writing process changed. Did you use office hours, or theELC, or the CWC? What effect did these have on your process and writing? How did you utilize peer review?

• Consider environmental factors that influence your writing process. Do you need to be alone? Do you like to work in public (in a library or coffee shop)? Do you need music or silence? Etc. 

• Consider the different stages of the writing process: invention, drafting, revision, editing, etc. What did you do during these stages at the beginning of the semester? Do you do anything differently now? What could you still work on or try to do differently in the future? 

• You might want to review “Autoethnography” in Writing About Writing, pages 873-85.

Planning and Drafting:

Determine a structuring principle for your essay and construct a brief outline:

• You could choose to follow your progression through the course, focusing on the challenges and/or successes for each essay. 

• You could choose to examine how your writing process changed for each assignment and analyze the consequences on the finished essay. 

• Explore other structuring principles that are unique to your writing. 

Your essay should be no less than four pages, and don’t forget the interesting title.