Eng 101
Meditation Through Headspace
Chad Osborne
Eng 101
2/4/2019
Meditation, you might think of meditation as something that overly emotional people do, maybe to the closed minded people it’s something that only Buddhist monks do. I think of it as something that can benefit humanity as a whole, if everyone meditated, I think the world would be a better place. Meditation is defined as “to engage in contemplation or reflection” (Merriam-Webster online dictionary) I think that it’s an accurate description, but it is so much more than that.
The way I meditate is by using the phone app Headspace, they have a couple free sample meditations on the app already, but I find that the paid version is much better. It’s kind of shame that they make you pay to get the most of the app, but how else are they supposed to keep the app running. They do have a student plan, which is much more affordable than the plans they have currently. What I recommend for people to do is to try it out and see if it fits them and then you can decide to get the paid version, regardless the app teaches you the basics of meditation, so you can meditate on your own if you don’t want to pay for it.
In the first meditations it was boring, and I would not sit still and concentrate on the meditation, sometimes I even fell asleep, but as time went on, and I kept up with it and made it part of my daily tradition I started getting better at it. Just as anything meditation takes time to learn and I’m learning every day I continue to meditate.
Meditation was significant initially because it taught me how to manage my anxiety, but over time it became something much more than that. It helped me with anxiety by teaching me better methods of recognizing when I started to get anxious. Once I noticed that anxiety was building I would lightly note whatever was causing me to be anxious and let it go. If it was something important causing me anxiety, I would write it down in my phone and that was another way of letting it go. The creator of Headspace Andy Puddicombe explains “we use the noting to create a bit of space, as a way of letting go, and to gain some clarity and learn more about our habits, tendencies, and conditioning.”(Puddicombe) I use it when I’m outside of the meditation exercise more often because I noticed I have many negative thoughts I just mark them as “thinking” then continue on with my day.
After using Headspace for my anxiety I began to get curious about what other applications I could use meditation for. I’ve always had trouble falling asleep, especially in high school, I took melatonin every night to fall asleep and sometimes even that didn’t work. My mind would just wander for hours and I would think about my day and the things that worried me instead of getting good quality sleep. When I found out about headspace’s sleepcast section I was immediately interested, but you had to get the paid version to access it. I decided that this is reason enough for me to invest in headspace. They have a couple sleep meditations on the free version, and I found it effective, but I got bored of listening to the same meditation over and over again. The “sleepcasts” are an entirely different experience to the rest of headspace, they have a seperate narrators to guide you to sleep and there are several different “sleepcasts” making sure you don’t get bored by listening to the same “sleepcast” over and over. The “sleepcast” starts out with a “wind-down”(headspace) typically with a visualization exercise, or a breathing exercise, then leads into a short story usually in an interesting place with many details for your mind to paint a detailed picture of this world. The narrator then proceeds to explain some trivial act within the context of the setting, underneath all of this is a nice ambient tone like waves on the beach or rain, this usually puts me right to sleep. I use the “sleepcast” function to fall asleep nearly every day.
I use Headspace whenever I need to focus. Whether at work at Starbucks or working on my coursework, Headspace has me covered. Usually meditations are ten minutes, at Starbucks my breaks are ten minutes long and I usually use that time to eat or drink something really fast so I can’t really meditate for ten mins at that time. Thankfully, the headspace creators understand this and offer shorter, more bite sized meditation exercises. I use one that is three minutes long, so I still have time to do something else on my ten minute break. I find this practice helps me achieve a “flow” state. Mike Oppland fines flow as“ It (flow) occurs when your skill level and the challenge at hand are equal” I’ve only experienced this a handful of times, but it has always been directly after I had just completed a focus meditation exercise. The exercise is primarily a visualization exercise, the best example is visualizing a bright sphere of glowing light and imagining it going up and down over your body, visualizing the glowing light as a comforting light that brings ease and a sense of warmth. It sounds weird, but focusing on an imaginary floating ball of light makes it easier to focus on tangible tasks. After the meditation is over I immediately go back onto the floor and I am focused on whatever task was demanded of me at the time. I highly recommend this exercise.
I don’t participate in the headspace community or the larger meditation community, even though I am technically a part of the community. For me it is a personal experience and the fact that other people go through the same experience as me connects me to the community as a whole. I think headspace has definitely shaped me as a person I’ve been using the app less than a year and I have so much more to learn, but it has changed my life for the better for sure. I am much more aware of my emotions and how to differentiate and recognize when the good emotions come up and when the bad ones surface. I used to be an anxious wreck and now that I recognize and let go of those anxious thoughts I feel like a much more balanced person. I still get anxiety and most of the time when I recognize it, it doesn’t go away, but I still understand that it's there and I can turn it into a useful emotion rather than a negative one.
I absolutely recommend downloading the app, trying the basic meditation exercises in the comfort of your own home and seeing if it works for you, or you should try the video that’s under the essay! Then deciding if it’s worth the cost of the subscription, they do offer that school discount. It’s okay if you don’t experience a profound moment in the first couple of meditations. Like I said earlier, meditation takes practice, you didn’t know how to walk or ride a bike and look at you now, pretty much a professional walker. It just takes time to learn, and it’s never too late.
Works Cited
Eng 101
2/4/2019
Meditation, you might think of meditation as something that overly emotional people do, maybe to the closed minded people it’s something that only Buddhist monks do. I think of it as something that can benefit humanity as a whole, if everyone meditated, I think the world would be a better place. Meditation is defined as “to engage in contemplation or reflection” (Merriam-Webster online dictionary) I think that it’s an accurate description, but it is so much more than that.
The way I meditate is by using the phone app Headspace, they have a couple free sample meditations on the app already, but I find that the paid version is much better. It’s kind of shame that they make you pay to get the most of the app, but how else are they supposed to keep the app running. They do have a student plan, which is much more affordable than the plans they have currently. What I recommend for people to do is to try it out and see if it fits them and then you can decide to get the paid version, regardless the app teaches you the basics of meditation, so you can meditate on your own if you don’t want to pay for it.
In the first meditations it was boring, and I would not sit still and concentrate on the meditation, sometimes I even fell asleep, but as time went on, and I kept up with it and made it part of my daily tradition I started getting better at it. Just as anything meditation takes time to learn and I’m learning every day I continue to meditate.
Meditation was significant initially because it taught me how to manage my anxiety, but over time it became something much more than that. It helped me with anxiety by teaching me better methods of recognizing when I started to get anxious. Once I noticed that anxiety was building I would lightly note whatever was causing me to be anxious and let it go. If it was something important causing me anxiety, I would write it down in my phone and that was another way of letting it go. The creator of Headspace Andy Puddicombe explains “we use the noting to create a bit of space, as a way of letting go, and to gain some clarity and learn more about our habits, tendencies, and conditioning.”(Puddicombe) I use it when I’m outside of the meditation exercise more often because I noticed I have many negative thoughts I just mark them as “thinking” then continue on with my day.
After using Headspace for my anxiety I began to get curious about what other applications I could use meditation for. I’ve always had trouble falling asleep, especially in high school, I took melatonin every night to fall asleep and sometimes even that didn’t work. My mind would just wander for hours and I would think about my day and the things that worried me instead of getting good quality sleep. When I found out about headspace’s sleepcast section I was immediately interested, but you had to get the paid version to access it. I decided that this is reason enough for me to invest in headspace. They have a couple sleep meditations on the free version, and I found it effective, but I got bored of listening to the same meditation over and over again. The “sleepcasts” are an entirely different experience to the rest of headspace, they have a seperate narrators to guide you to sleep and there are several different “sleepcasts” making sure you don’t get bored by listening to the same “sleepcast” over and over. The “sleepcast” starts out with a “wind-down”(headspace) typically with a visualization exercise, or a breathing exercise, then leads into a short story usually in an interesting place with many details for your mind to paint a detailed picture of this world. The narrator then proceeds to explain some trivial act within the context of the setting, underneath all of this is a nice ambient tone like waves on the beach or rain, this usually puts me right to sleep. I use the “sleepcast” function to fall asleep nearly every day.
I use Headspace whenever I need to focus. Whether at work at Starbucks or working on my coursework, Headspace has me covered. Usually meditations are ten minutes, at Starbucks my breaks are ten minutes long and I usually use that time to eat or drink something really fast so I can’t really meditate for ten mins at that time. Thankfully, the headspace creators understand this and offer shorter, more bite sized meditation exercises. I use one that is three minutes long, so I still have time to do something else on my ten minute break. I find this practice helps me achieve a “flow” state. Mike Oppland fines flow as“ It (flow) occurs when your skill level and the challenge at hand are equal” I’ve only experienced this a handful of times, but it has always been directly after I had just completed a focus meditation exercise. The exercise is primarily a visualization exercise, the best example is visualizing a bright sphere of glowing light and imagining it going up and down over your body, visualizing the glowing light as a comforting light that brings ease and a sense of warmth. It sounds weird, but focusing on an imaginary floating ball of light makes it easier to focus on tangible tasks. After the meditation is over I immediately go back onto the floor and I am focused on whatever task was demanded of me at the time. I highly recommend this exercise.
I don’t participate in the headspace community or the larger meditation community, even though I am technically a part of the community. For me it is a personal experience and the fact that other people go through the same experience as me connects me to the community as a whole. I think headspace has definitely shaped me as a person I’ve been using the app less than a year and I have so much more to learn, but it has changed my life for the better for sure. I am much more aware of my emotions and how to differentiate and recognize when the good emotions come up and when the bad ones surface. I used to be an anxious wreck and now that I recognize and let go of those anxious thoughts I feel like a much more balanced person. I still get anxiety and most of the time when I recognize it, it doesn’t go away, but I still understand that it's there and I can turn it into a useful emotion rather than a negative one.
I absolutely recommend downloading the app, trying the basic meditation exercises in the comfort of your own home and seeing if it works for you, or you should try the video that’s under the essay! Then deciding if it’s worth the cost of the subscription, they do offer that school discount. It’s okay if you don’t experience a profound moment in the first couple of meditations. Like I said earlier, meditation takes practice, you didn’t know how to walk or ride a bike and look at you now, pretty much a professional walker. It just takes time to learn, and it’s never too late.
Works Cited
- “What Will I Learn .” Headspace.com, © 2019 HEADSPACE INC., Santa Monica, CA, www.headspace.com/how-it-works-test.
- Puddicombe, Andy. “What the Noting Technique Is, and How to Take Advantage of It.” Headspace.com, © 2019 HEADSPACE INC., www.headspace.com/blog/2017/07/18/noting-technique-take-advantage/.
- “Meditate .” Https://Www.merriam-Webster.com, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meditate.
- “What Is a Sleepcast?” Headspace.com, help.headspace.com/hc/en-us/articles/360009450393-What-is-a-sleepcast-.
Rough Draft
Meditation, you might think of meditation as something that overly emotional people do, maybe to the closed minded people it’s something that only Buddhist monks do. I think of it as something that can benefit humanity as a whole, if everyone meditated, I think the world would be a better place. Meditation is defined as “to engage in contemplation or reflection” (Merriam-Webster online dictionary) I think that it’s an accurate description, but it is so much more than that.
The way I meditate is by using the phone app Headspace, they have a couple free sample meditations on the app already, but I find that the paid version is much better. It’s kind of shame that they make you pay to get the most of the app, but how else are they supposed to keep the app running. They do have a student plan, though, which is much more affordable than the plans they have currently. What I recommend for people to do is to try it out and see if it fits them and then you can decide to get the paid version, regardless the app teaches you the basics of meditation, so you can meditate on your own if you don’t want to pay for it.
In the first meditations it was boring, and I would not sit still and concentrate on the meditation, sometimes I even fell asleep, but as time went on, and I kept up with it and made it part of my daily tradition I started getting better at it. Just as anything meditation takes time to learn and I’m learning every day I continue to meditate.
Meditation was significant initially because it taught me how to manage my anxiety, but over time it became something much more than that. It helped me with anxiety by teaching me better methods of recognizing when I started to get anxious. Once I noticed that anxiety was building I would lightly note whatever was causing me to be anxious and let it go. If it was something important causing me anxiety, I would write it down in my phone and that was another way of letting it go. The creator of Headspace Andy Puddicombe explains “we use the noting to create a bit of space, as a way of letting go, and to gain some clarity and learn more about our habits, tendencies, and conditioning.”(Puddicombe) I use it when I’m outside of the meditation exercise more often because I notice I have a lot of unhelpful thoughts.
After using Headspace for my anxiety I began to get curious about what other applications I could use meditation for. I’ve always had trouble falling asleep, especially in high school, I took melatonin every night to fall asleep and sometimes even that didn’t work. My mind would just wander for hours and I would think about my day and the things that worried me instead of getting good quality sleep. When I found out about headspace’s sleepcast section I was immediately interested, but you had to get the paid version to access it. I decided that this is reason enough for me to invest in headspace. They have a couple sleep meditations on the free version, and I found it effective, but I got bored of listening to the same meditation over and over again. The “sleepcasts” are an entirely different experience to the rest of headspace, they have a seperate narrators to guide you to sleep and there are several different “sleepcasts” making sure you don’t get bored by listening to the same “sleepcast” over and over. The “sleepcast” starts out with a “wind-down”(headspace) typically with a visualization exercise, or a breathing exercise, then leads into a short story usually in an interesting place with many details for your mind to paint a detailed picture of this world. The narrator then proceeds to explain some trivial act within the context of the setting, underneath all of this is a nice ambient tone like waves on the beach or rain, this usually puts me right to sleep. I use the “sleepcast” function to fall asleep nearly every day.
I use Headspace whenever I need to focus. Whether at work or working on my coursework, Headspace has me covered. Usually meditations are ten minutes, at Starbucks my breaks are ten minutes long and I usually use that time to eat or drink something really fast so I can’t really meditate for 10 mins at that time. Thankfully, the headspace creators understand this and offer shorter, more bite sized meditation exercises. I use one that is three minutes long, so I still have time to do something else on my ten minute break. I find this practice helps me achieve a “flow” state. Mike Oppland defines flow as“ It (flow) occurs when your skill level and the challenge at hand are equal” I’ve only experienced this a handful of times, but it has always been directly after I had just completed a focus meditation exercise. The exercise is primarily a visualization exercise, the best example is visualizing a bright sphere of glowing light and imagining it going up and down over your body, visualizing the glowing light as a comforting light that brings ease and a sense of warmth. After the meditation is over I immediately go back onto the floor and I am focused on whatever task was demanded of me at the time. I highly recommend this exercise.
I don’t participate in the headspace community or the larger meditation community, even though I am technically a part of the community. For me it is a personal experience and the fact that other people go through the same experience as me connects me to the community as a whole. I think headspace has definitely shaped me as a person I’ve been using the app less than a year and I have so much more to learn, but it has changed my life for the better for sure. I am much more aware of my emotions and how to differentiate and recognize when the good emotions come up and when the bad ones surface. I used to be an anxious wreck and now that I recognize and let go of those anxious thoughts I feel like a much more balanced person. I still get anxiety and most of the time when I recognize it, it doesn’t go away, but I still understand that it's there and I can turn it into a useful emotion rather than a negative one.
I absolutely recommend downloading the app, trying the basic meditation exercises in the comfort of your own home and seeing if it works for you. Then deciding if it’s worth the cost of the subscription, they do offer that school discount. It’s okay if you don’t experience a profound moment in the first couple of meditations. Like I said earlier, meditation takes practice, you didn’t know how to walk or ride a bike and look at you now, pretty much a professional walker. It just takes time to learn, and it’s never too late.
Meditation, you might think of meditation as something that overly emotional people do, maybe to the closed minded people it’s something that only Buddhist monks do. I think of it as something that can benefit humanity as a whole, if everyone meditated, I think the world would be a better place. Meditation is defined as “to engage in contemplation or reflection” (Merriam-Webster online dictionary) I think that it’s an accurate description, but it is so much more than that.
The way I meditate is by using the phone app Headspace, they have a couple free sample meditations on the app already, but I find that the paid version is much better. It’s kind of shame that they make you pay to get the most of the app, but how else are they supposed to keep the app running. They do have a student plan, though, which is much more affordable than the plans they have currently. What I recommend for people to do is to try it out and see if it fits them and then you can decide to get the paid version, regardless the app teaches you the basics of meditation, so you can meditate on your own if you don’t want to pay for it.
In the first meditations it was boring, and I would not sit still and concentrate on the meditation, sometimes I even fell asleep, but as time went on, and I kept up with it and made it part of my daily tradition I started getting better at it. Just as anything meditation takes time to learn and I’m learning every day I continue to meditate.
Meditation was significant initially because it taught me how to manage my anxiety, but over time it became something much more than that. It helped me with anxiety by teaching me better methods of recognizing when I started to get anxious. Once I noticed that anxiety was building I would lightly note whatever was causing me to be anxious and let it go. If it was something important causing me anxiety, I would write it down in my phone and that was another way of letting it go. The creator of Headspace Andy Puddicombe explains “we use the noting to create a bit of space, as a way of letting go, and to gain some clarity and learn more about our habits, tendencies, and conditioning.”(Puddicombe) I use it when I’m outside of the meditation exercise more often because I notice I have a lot of unhelpful thoughts.
After using Headspace for my anxiety I began to get curious about what other applications I could use meditation for. I’ve always had trouble falling asleep, especially in high school, I took melatonin every night to fall asleep and sometimes even that didn’t work. My mind would just wander for hours and I would think about my day and the things that worried me instead of getting good quality sleep. When I found out about headspace’s sleepcast section I was immediately interested, but you had to get the paid version to access it. I decided that this is reason enough for me to invest in headspace. They have a couple sleep meditations on the free version, and I found it effective, but I got bored of listening to the same meditation over and over again. The “sleepcasts” are an entirely different experience to the rest of headspace, they have a seperate narrators to guide you to sleep and there are several different “sleepcasts” making sure you don’t get bored by listening to the same “sleepcast” over and over. The “sleepcast” starts out with a “wind-down”(headspace) typically with a visualization exercise, or a breathing exercise, then leads into a short story usually in an interesting place with many details for your mind to paint a detailed picture of this world. The narrator then proceeds to explain some trivial act within the context of the setting, underneath all of this is a nice ambient tone like waves on the beach or rain, this usually puts me right to sleep. I use the “sleepcast” function to fall asleep nearly every day.
I use Headspace whenever I need to focus. Whether at work or working on my coursework, Headspace has me covered. Usually meditations are ten minutes, at Starbucks my breaks are ten minutes long and I usually use that time to eat or drink something really fast so I can’t really meditate for 10 mins at that time. Thankfully, the headspace creators understand this and offer shorter, more bite sized meditation exercises. I use one that is three minutes long, so I still have time to do something else on my ten minute break. I find this practice helps me achieve a “flow” state. Mike Oppland defines flow as“ It (flow) occurs when your skill level and the challenge at hand are equal” I’ve only experienced this a handful of times, but it has always been directly after I had just completed a focus meditation exercise. The exercise is primarily a visualization exercise, the best example is visualizing a bright sphere of glowing light and imagining it going up and down over your body, visualizing the glowing light as a comforting light that brings ease and a sense of warmth. After the meditation is over I immediately go back onto the floor and I am focused on whatever task was demanded of me at the time. I highly recommend this exercise.
I don’t participate in the headspace community or the larger meditation community, even though I am technically a part of the community. For me it is a personal experience and the fact that other people go through the same experience as me connects me to the community as a whole. I think headspace has definitely shaped me as a person I’ve been using the app less than a year and I have so much more to learn, but it has changed my life for the better for sure. I am much more aware of my emotions and how to differentiate and recognize when the good emotions come up and when the bad ones surface. I used to be an anxious wreck and now that I recognize and let go of those anxious thoughts I feel like a much more balanced person. I still get anxiety and most of the time when I recognize it, it doesn’t go away, but I still understand that it's there and I can turn it into a useful emotion rather than a negative one.
I absolutely recommend downloading the app, trying the basic meditation exercises in the comfort of your own home and seeing if it works for you. Then deciding if it’s worth the cost of the subscription, they do offer that school discount. It’s okay if you don’t experience a profound moment in the first couple of meditations. Like I said earlier, meditation takes practice, you didn’t know how to walk or ride a bike and look at you now, pretty much a professional walker. It just takes time to learn, and it’s never too late.
- “What Will I Learn .” Headspace.com, © 2019 HEADSPACE INC., Santa Monica, CA, www.headspace.com/how-it-works-test.
- Puddicombe, Andy. “What the Noting Technique Is, and How to Take Advantage of It.” Headspace.com, © 2019 HEADSPACE INC., www.headspace.com/blog/2017/07/18/noting-technique-take-advantage/.
- “Meditate .” Https://Www.merriam-Webster.com, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meditate.
- “What Is a Sleepcast?” Headspace.com, help.headspace.com/hc/en-us/articles/360009450393-What-is-a-sleepcast-.
Writing Project 1: Autoethnography
Background and Overview
So far in our course, you have started to see that you belong to a set of communities, and these communities—their rituals, practices, and various phenomena—are closely tied to your identity. This relationship naturally raises various questions: How do you experience your community? What communal rituals, practices, traditions, behaviors, and/or objects have influenced your understanding of your identity? What does it mean to define your identity through your relationship to these phenomena?
To explore these questions and others related to them, you will compose your first major writing assignment—an autoethnography. To write this autoethnography, you will select a specific habit, ritual, or behavior (what we are calling a “cultural phenomenon”) you practice and investigate it. Doing so will help you discover what this activity says about you, your personal experiences, and the ways those personal experiences connect to the experiences of others.
The autoethnography is both an easy and a difficult form of writing. It is easy because, we are writing about what we know: ourselves. It is difficult because we must communicate the significance of our experience to our audience, making a connection between our own experiences and those of our readers. We must confront the hard truth that an event is not significant just because “it happened to me.” The event must offer some take-away value, and the writer who writes about the event must be able to answer the question “so what?” The answer to this question is the primary insight of the autoethnography, or the ultimate point that you are trying to make. Autoethnographies are not just chronological narrations of events; they communicate the event’s meaning and leave readers with a dominant impression of what it might have been like to experience it themselves.
For example, you might explore
- your methods of transportation. Do you walk, ride a bike, drive, or take a train to work/school? Why? What might your routine say about your identity or culture?
- your preferences for certain types of food. What do your choices say about your beliefs?
- your reading habits. Do you read the newspaper over coffee? Do you read before bed? What do you read? Why? What might these habits convey about your age, class, or social group?
Requirements and Deliverables
1. In your essay, you should select one habit, ritual, practice, or behavior and reflect upon this “phenomenon,” articulating why and how it has been significant for you. How have you been shaped as a person within your larger community by this activity?
2. Whatever your topic habit, ritual, practice, or behavior, your essay should be informed by close observation and provide a level of detail through example, anecdote, and explanation, which enables a reader to relate to your understanding of the action and its significance. It should provide significant insight into what has made/makes you who you are by including detailed descriptions of places and events while explaining the significance of these events to the formation of your own beliefs and behaviors.
3. Your essay should be written with an audience in mind: it should be organized in such a way that a reader can follow your thinking and reasoning from paragraph to paragraph and within each paragraph. This organization should lead your reader to your primary insight or ultimate point in a clear manner; in other words, your primary insight should help structure your paper.
4. Your essay needs to include and integrate at least one multimodal element. You could include pictures, sounds, or even hyperlinks to other resources, but you must make sure that your reader understands why you are including these elements and why including them enriches your piece of writing. Consider what media beyond text might reinforce your main idea to readers, convey in another way the significance of your autoethnography, and/or appeal to your readers from a different register.
5. Your completed essay should have a title and be at least 1200-1500 words in length.
Project Submission
- Rough Draft: Your rough draft will be submitted for peer review and to your e-portfolio.
- Revised Draft: Your revised draft should be uploaded to your e-portfolio.
Tips:
- Get started early.
- Review this week’s materials and discussions.
- Set a writing/research schedule and stick to it.
Background and Overview
So far in our course, you have started to see that you belong to a set of communities, and these communities—their rituals, practices, and various phenomena—are closely tied to your identity. This relationship naturally raises various questions: How do you experience your community? What communal rituals, practices, traditions, behaviors, and/or objects have influenced your understanding of your identity? What does it mean to define your identity through your relationship to these phenomena?
To explore these questions and others related to them, you will compose your first major writing assignment—an autoethnography. To write this autoethnography, you will select a specific habit, ritual, or behavior (what we are calling a “cultural phenomenon”) you practice and investigate it. Doing so will help you discover what this activity says about you, your personal experiences, and the ways those personal experiences connect to the experiences of others.
The autoethnography is both an easy and a difficult form of writing. It is easy because, we are writing about what we know: ourselves. It is difficult because we must communicate the significance of our experience to our audience, making a connection between our own experiences and those of our readers. We must confront the hard truth that an event is not significant just because “it happened to me.” The event must offer some take-away value, and the writer who writes about the event must be able to answer the question “so what?” The answer to this question is the primary insight of the autoethnography, or the ultimate point that you are trying to make. Autoethnographies are not just chronological narrations of events; they communicate the event’s meaning and leave readers with a dominant impression of what it might have been like to experience it themselves.
For example, you might explore
- your methods of transportation. Do you walk, ride a bike, drive, or take a train to work/school? Why? What might your routine say about your identity or culture?
- your preferences for certain types of food. What do your choices say about your beliefs?
- your reading habits. Do you read the newspaper over coffee? Do you read before bed? What do you read? Why? What might these habits convey about your age, class, or social group?
Requirements and Deliverables
1. In your essay, you should select one habit, ritual, practice, or behavior and reflect upon this “phenomenon,” articulating why and how it has been significant for you. How have you been shaped as a person within your larger community by this activity?
2. Whatever your topic habit, ritual, practice, or behavior, your essay should be informed by close observation and provide a level of detail through example, anecdote, and explanation, which enables a reader to relate to your understanding of the action and its significance. It should provide significant insight into what has made/makes you who you are by including detailed descriptions of places and events while explaining the significance of these events to the formation of your own beliefs and behaviors.
3. Your essay should be written with an audience in mind: it should be organized in such a way that a reader can follow your thinking and reasoning from paragraph to paragraph and within each paragraph. This organization should lead your reader to your primary insight or ultimate point in a clear manner; in other words, your primary insight should help structure your paper.
4. Your essay needs to include and integrate at least one multimodal element. You could include pictures, sounds, or even hyperlinks to other resources, but you must make sure that your reader understands why you are including these elements and why including them enriches your piece of writing. Consider what media beyond text might reinforce your main idea to readers, convey in another way the significance of your autoethnography, and/or appeal to your readers from a different register.
5. Your completed essay should have a title and be at least 1200-1500 words in length.
Project Submission
- Rough Draft: Your rough draft will be submitted for peer review and to your e-portfolio.
- Revised Draft: Your revised draft should be uploaded to your e-portfolio.
Tips:
- Get started early.
- Review this week’s materials and discussions.
- Set a writing/research schedule and stick to it.