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 to those 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 authoethnography.

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 talk about what you are doing as your write or use screen recording to actually
record what 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, the
ELC 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.

DUE DATES:

Draft for class writers’ workshop:

Final Draft uploaded to Dropbox: