Reading Commentary

While I enjoy and benefit from Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, I am perturbed by a few things associated with this book. Number one: verbosity. While detail is good, they often say things that could be reduced further or that add very little understanding. The words of my high school teachers come up; they are "saying" rather than "showing" in their less-informative bits. This frustration will motivate me to try to be considerately concise in writing my own mini-ethnography. (This blog entry will stand as a glaring sign of my ineptitude in this.)

I am taking special care in reading their notes about how to write an ethnography. I must say that I think it will be a great challenge for me to refrain from falling back on age-old thesis-related writing. I do feel comforted by the case scenarios, though, because my observations feeling like they are coming to naught- or at least are outside the scope of my original study questions.

This idea of first coding, then making memos is also new to me, though coding sounds a bit like AP English Literature writing excerpt analysis. Am I wrong in thinking this? Can we analyze our own choice of words? Can we add our feelings as we go along? Also, are memos essential? I see myself coding first then rolling ideas around in my head to make a narrative chunk of disparate parts. Then, I might go back around and refine the topics of these narrative chunks.

The idea of finding (or "creating") processes and not causes for behavior was new to me, though I should have known based on the title of certain courses at this very school (namely Social Patterns and Processes). I think I would like to discuss the idea of a process-based as opposed to a causation-based analysis in class.

Whoever read all this deserves a gold star!! :)