Writing toward your public, well educated audience

I’d like you to take one of the strategies we discussed today and try it out, cultivating an appropriate approach for your public, well educated audience. Working from your responses to the invention exercises that you completed over the weekend, write a paragraph in which you open up a discussion about the issue you’ll be writing about. It could be the beginning of an introduction to your essay, or it might be a body paragraph. Regardless, I want you to begin writing, developing your focus for this paper, keeping your audience in mind.

Defining the public good

Based on today’s reading, how would you define the public good? In what ways might your final essay respond to, incorporate, or in some way relate to your emerging notion of what the public good is (or could or should be)?

Reflecting on your mapping project

Now that you’ve completed the second major project for this class, I’d like you to take a few minutes and reflect on this assignment. First, what was it like to do qualitative research, i.e., observations and interviews, for this project? What distinguishes this kind of research from our first project? What did you learn as a researcher from this assignment?

Second, what was it like to write in this genre, i.e., in the format of a social-science study? What did you do differently as a writer to successfully meet the expectations of this situation? What did you learn as a writer from this experience?

Field Notes III

By the end of the week, please post your final set of fieldnotes here to our course blog as a comment. Make sure and include the same kind of information as in previous fieldnotes. In this final set of notes, though, sketch out any tentative conclusions you are making about your research thus far. What strikes you as significant? Why?

Field Notes II

After you conduct your second observation of your space for your mapping project, please post a second set of field notes here on Tuesday, April 26.

As you make notes from your observations, please make sure you include the following information: 1) Date, time, and place of observation; 2) Specific facts, numbers, and details; 3) Sensory impressions: sights, sounds, textures, smells, tastes; 4) Personal response to your observations—both the act of recording and how others responded to you; 5) Specific words, phrases, summaries of conversations/interviews, and any insider language; 6) Questions that your observations generate for you as the researcher (ones that you might pursue in your subsequent observations).

As you conclude this set of notes, please write a paragraph in which you summarize your observation, paying attention to what you noticed that was either similar to your previous observation or different. What do you think accounts for this?

Reflecting on the rhetorical conventions of a qualitative study

To start class today, I’d like you to reflect on how the study—“Creating Community”—was organized and written. That is, I’d like us to generate a keener sense of the rhetoric of a scholarly study within the field of ethnography. First, how would you characterize or describe the study’s organization? What is the purpose of each section and how do they relate to each other and develop the study’s main argument? What is the study’s main claim and where is it located? What kind of evidence does Amada Armenta draw on to substantiate her claim(s)? How would you describe the voice, level of formality, and other stylistic features of this kind of writing? What do you think you might take from this study when you start drafting your own piece later next week?

Field Notes I

After you conduct your first observation of your space for your mapping project, please post your first set of field notes here before class begins on Thursday, April 21. As you make notes from your observations, please make sure you include the following information: 1) Date, time, and place of observation; 2) Specific facts, numbers, and details; 3) Sensory impressions: sights, sounds, textures, smells, tastes; 4) Personal response to your observations—both to the act of recording and how others responded to you; 5) Specific words, phrases, summaries of conversations/interviews, and any insider language; 6) Questions that your observations generate for you as the researcher (ones that you might pursue in your subsequent observations).

Please note: You are welcome to post the highlights or a summary of your field notes, especially if you take your notes by hand. If you type them on your laptop, then you're welcome to post all your notes, or a substantial section of them (since it's easier to cut and paste).