Autoethnogrophy 1 rough
Nicholas Mongell
English 101
Marlen Harrison
March 30, 2009
“I”’s affect on my writing
When I first came into this semester I had set goals for myself. I was in a rough spot with my academic career already and i was focused and determined to go through with achieving a good passing grade in my English class. The thing that detoured me the most was i wasnt confident with writing ever. I can be the first to admit i half assed my way through my high school collage prep classes walking away with a B average. Over all I felt as though I was a smart capable writer who just needed to put more into his work.
The first assignment that really made me think was Kawai’s, “What Is I?” paper. At first I viewed this as trying to complete the assignment of answering that question, but it wasn’t until recently that i applied the question “What Is I?” into my own life. I came to the conclusion that I is the end product of me. I is created by the things that influence me, my likes and dislikes, and who i am as a whole. Now knowing what I is to me i can look back at all my work done within this semester and explain why a paper is this way, or how i came up with this idea.
What is I may have been the most important assignment to me at this point in time, but Anne LaMott’s “shitty first drafts” was the first real influence on my writing style. This reading was one that I always referred to through out the year. It fed the idea into my head that every paper is not going to be perfect in one draft, It may take multiple drafts for it to even be acceptable. With that in mind, It made me a more confident writer within my blogs and essays. It made me less timid and more likely to put something in my papers or writing that i would think would be a risk.: It gave me a new mind set. Instead of sitting down to do a paper and thinking ” Well I need to have X amount of info on this topic, and X amount of info on this topic, this needs to have 3 citations, grammer needs to be perfect, ect ect ect” i would think ” This is my first draft, Im going to write my thoughts and my ideas down on paper, it doesnt need to be perfect. this is my shitty first draft.” This makes me feel extremly relaxed when writing and i contribute alot of my success to that.
Getting through my first essay was suprisingly easy. It had only taken me one minor revision and it was graded. Reading this essay now compared to some of my previous blog entrys, and previous high school papers i can see a huge difference in my writing style. Most of it i can credit towards my new relaxed approach to writing thanks to Anne LaMott and my second I would have to attribute to lovely Diana Ackerman. At first I was really dreading reading “A Natural history of the senses” but now i can appreciate her writing style and its influence on me. Her down to earth sense of writing and her sexual oriented twists on her writing related back to me and made it interesting and enjoyable.
I thought of how ackerman’s writing style, and i looked at it as a way to include I in my writing yet be informative. It taught me how to explain my views in more than one way. In my first essay on taste I tried to break away from my normal style of writing and used techniques i had picked up from LaMott and Ackerman. the paper was a narrative and i wrote it as if though i was talking to a friend, i used the same type of language and kept it somewhat personal. This is one of the things i attribute to my success of my paper and future papers.
Moving on through the semester i came to my 2nd essay on vision. This essay is one that i never really liked and i am still currently correcting. Even though i do not like this paper i can learn a lot about myself through reading it. While i look over this paper i see that i am trying to explain a picture in detail but i have no goals or aims for the paper. In other words i am just writing a huge essay describing a picture. This shows a great deal of immaturity as a writer. It tells me that i haven’t organized my goal statements, which i know find very crucial for me to have set in stone before i write a successful paper.
The third essay I had written was on Smell. I had used a definitive genre and over all i really had enjoyed writing this essay. My first draft I had one noticeable problem, i did not make the length requirement. This was one of those “I’ve written everything on my mind that i have, what else can i do? fuck.” moments. When i was faced with this situations i learned how to truly appreciate the reason of why Marlen pushed us to write goal statements before our blogs and previous papers. Reading through my goal statement, I noticed where and what i could elaborate on and what i could add into my essay allowing me to add enough in to meet the page requirement without my paper being boring and full of rambling.
After this paper I went through another incredible process that made me improve as a writer; the peer editing process. At first i didnt know how to feel for this experience. I wasn’t making a big deal out of it, until i actually had to do it. I felt as if i had to be critical as i held someone else’s grade in my hands, but i also felt, as i soon learned was correct, that im not an expert writer so I don’t truly have to over analyze there paper. My approach to this was pretty simple. Just like an essay, i would set my goals of what i wanted to look for. I would first read there goal and pre writing statements, then read through there essay, read the post writing info and the grade the rubric. I enjoyed this experience a lot. By reading another peers paper it allows me to see how other people in my position are writing. i dont consider it cheating or copying, but rather learning because im gaining different ideas from there styles of writing.
My fourth essay brought around nothing very new or exciting to me as a writer, but the fact of consistency. The essay writing process to me was just now beginning to feel natural. At this time I was not thinking to myself “Fuck i have a 5 page paper to write this sucks” but of “I have a paper to write this is easier than my other work.” I think that my writing at this point has gotten as good as it can be for the semester and i can say in retrospect that this isn’t true at all. When i reread my paper after the peer editing process I see that I have a problem construing my point of view in my writing without confusion. I tend to often confuse the reader more the more i talk about something.
Moving to my fifth paper I had more anxiety in the beginning compared to any other assignment. I think what brought this about was Marlen’s last remark before leaving class on the friday before it was due. He said ” Guys this is your last essay, so show me your best.” Immediately I began to think that this can not be a shitty first draft, so i took a new approach to my pre writing. Like usual, i began writing my pre writing goals and defining what i wanted to do and explain in my paper. I then began mind mapping and came up with two possible route for my paper and narrowed it down into two different genres. I than began writing a paper on the pros and cons of Hearing and comparing the with the other sense. By the time i had three pages written i was completely disgusted with what i had written and felt like i wasn’t meeting any of my goals. Before i went as far to scrap it i called my sister to peer read it through an email. She didn’t critique it as hard as i did, but the end choice resulted in me rewriting the entire paper over again. This time i took my best points from my first paper as more to add into my goals.
When i had finally finished my essay on hearing I was able to take a step back and look at my progress on this assignment and compare it to the other essays. Over all i spent much more time and work on this essay for a first draft compared to the others, but personally i believe it showed as well. I believe my interests and key points were more clear than the ones in my other papers, and i had a relatively easy time writing my paper. Because of the extremely long pre writing process i went through i had an easy time putting my thoughts and ideas on paper, and i think for future papers in other subjects i will take the time to do this again.
After essay five is the point where i really can say I learned What I is. I was defined in all of my essays. This is what I think I is in my writing:
I is my first thoughts on assignment when I learn of it. I is my thought process on organizing an essay. I is how I feel when writing a paper. I is how how i write an essay through my eyes I is my sense of gratification when the first draft is done. I is how i refine my essays
Outside of my writing I have learned a lot about myself asking the question “what is I?”. I is my point of view on everything in the world and the way i let the world affect me. It is a paradox. To define what is I, is to use your point of view and your interests into it. I have defined who I am as a writer by writing.I believe that is the only it can be done. Writing is the single most way of expressing yourself, and i believe this contradicts the age old saying of “actions speak louder than words.” Actions do not tell you what you think about something, how you would react to it, what you do not like about it or anything very descriptive compared to writing. A good example of this would be the workshop on hearing. We were using our sense of hearing to stereotype people by there sense of music. I disagreed with this a lot, but i did not show it in any way other than in my blog responses.
