How does your specific discipline shape your research? In what ways do you transcend disciplinary boundaries?
Describe your field setting. Why was this the appropriate setting for your subject?
What safeguards do you take in your own research to ensure that the people you work with are participants rather than subjects? How do you ensure that they are not only treated ethically, but in a socially just manner?
Explain to your reader why you chose an ethnographic approach to your study and why this approach is the best one for answering your particular research questions.
Discuss your method and data collection. How did you enter/exit the field? How did you build relationships with the people in your project? What data did you collect? How did you manage and analyze your data? Explain your process to your reader.
Think about one individual in your research. Write about how you would maintain that person’s privacy while still maintaining authenticity.
How might you engage in member checking in your own research? What advantages and drawbacks do you see to this approach?
Intentionally write one scene from your research in at least three of the different types of tales described in this book. Which best represented that particular scene?
Choose the type of tale that resonates most with you. Defend it to its detractors.
Do you have any hesitations about writing creatively? What are they? Write them out and then write an argument against each.
List three criticisms that colleagues might have of your work. Write rebuttals for each.
Identify a story that you find compelling. It can be written or visual. What details and emotions are evoked in your own imagination?
What narratives do you find compelling? Examine their underlying structure. What does the author or creator do to hold your interest?
Map your ethnography onto a graph of the story arc. Identify each element under the curve within your tale.
Write a kicker for the ending of your own project.
As academics, we are always reading. Make a list of evocative stories (fiction and nonfiction) that stuck with you long after you finished reading them. What made them evocative? Tease out the techniques the authors used and apply them to your own work.
Identify the payoff of your work. What do you hope will resonate with your readers long after they’ve finished reading your work?
Write about your own feelings about your ethnographic research. Write several scenes from your project in which your own emotions were brought to the surface. For example, did you ever cry (or try hard not to) during an interview?
Choose one instance from your research. Write about it from both a far and close perspective.
Find your favorite passage from your favorite writer. Copy it by hand.
Write a passage from your own research in first, second, and third person. Which perspective works best for that passage?
Read through your manuscript and circle every instance of ‘is’ or ‘to be’ or any derivatives thereof. Rewrite those sentences with action verbs.
As you edit your sentences, make sure that the reader can clearly identify who is doing the action.
Read through a passage that you’ve written from your own research. Identify all adverbs. Rewrite those sentences, using adjectives and action verbs to replace the adverbs.
List five compelling details from your field notes. Use them to describe a scene from your field to someone who has never been in that setting. Include sensual descriptions, such as how the place looked, sounded, smelled, and felt.
Create a composite character—a person who exemplifies the people in your research. Write a character sketch. Explain who this person is, give them a name, descriptive characteristics, and a background story.
Write 1667 words today about your project. Don’t look at your notes and don’t over-think the process. Leave all mistakes alone. Just write.
Practice letting go of your inner editor. Set a timer for fifteen minutes and free-write about your research. Every time you try to edit yourself, write the words, “I don’t have time to edit now, I will edit later,” and then continue writing.
Choose three quotes from your own research. Write each verbatim and then write it again, this time editing out extraneous words and subverbalizations. Does editing the quote change your perspective on what the participant said?
List 5 characteristics that are general to a group of people in your research. Write a composite character that includes each of those characteristics.
Write the background story of one of the actual people in your research. Clue the reader into that person’s motivations for action.
Identify a conversation in your own field notes or transcripts that provides compelling evidence for one of your analytic points. Write out that conversation and link it directly to that point.
Write a conversation in multiple formats. Which works best to both illustrate your point and draw your reader into your world?
Identify one metaphor that your participants use. What does that metaphor mean to them? How might you incorporate it in your writing?
Write a short scene from your research. Use a metaphor creatively in that scene.
Write a vignette to frame a section of your analytic writing.
Be honest with yourself: How much time do you spend editing what you write? How could you be more effective?
Print out something that you’ve written for one of these writing prompts. Put the pages in a drawer. Wait two weeks. Take them back out and read them. Did you see the work any differently?
Review a passage that you have written for one of these prompts (you are doing these, right?). Replace or define any jargon for your reader.
Appendix Writing Prompts
In: Writing Ethnography (Second Edition)
Author:
Jessica Smartt Gullion
Jessica Smartt Gullion
Search for other papers by Jessica Smartt Gullion in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Search for other papers by Jessica Smartt Gullion in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed