Diaz 1 Madelyn Diaz ENC 1101 0045 11:30- 12:20 Autoethnography It has always been said that in order

to love anyone else, you have to love yourself. In other words, the first step in accomplishing a healthy relationship begins with the ability of appreciating and understanding yourself enough to open your heart and allow others to love you. Similarly, in writing, one must begin by understanding themselves as writers and their writing styles before they can appeal to a broader audience while expanding their own writing techniques. Over time, more and more researchers became interested in trying to understand the writing processes of students. The goal of most researchers was to strive to understand students as writers to help teachers understand their writing processes to improve teaching methods better suited for their students. Researchers such as Sondra Perl and Carol Berkenkotter, set forth to understand the writers process through a technique called the think aloud method. This method required writers to say everything that they are thinking aloud while answering a prompt for the researcher to gather an understanding of that particular writer and their way of writing. During this experiment, the researchers would record the writers thoughts and use that information for further analysis. Researchers would use a set of coding to help organize the thoughts of the writer; similar to the one I used listed in Appendix B. Through the coding process, Perl and Berkenkotter observed unique patterns that helped examine the processes of different types of writers. Sondra Perl studied a group of 5 students that were labeled as unskilled writers. She

Diaz 2 wanted to further understand a group of writers that previous researchers have ignored and to collect data to help improve the education system of future English departments. Carol Berkenkotter, on the other hand, conducted her research on an individual that was classified as a highly skilled writer, Donald Murray. While Perl studied her writers in a more controlled environment, Berkenkotter allowed Murray to write wherever he felt the most comfortable to obtain a greater understanding on Murrays true writing process. Combining the work of Perl and Berkenkotter, I wanted to understand my own writing process by writing down my thoughts while responding to a prompt similar to Perl, but in my most comfortable environment such as Berkenkotters experiment. Thus, I chose to do the think aloud method. I want to further examine the way I write in the hopes of understanding my processes of writings enough to help improve my writing abilities. Methodology To start my research, I chose to respond to a prompt from my World History class. The reason being, I knew I would struggle a lot more with an English prompt that was very broad with no direction as opposed to a World History essay topic that tells you exactly what to write about. My prompt was to analyze how geography and the environment shaped the rise and development of civilizations in at least two of the following ancient civilizations: Sumerian, Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese. Before I could work on my essay, I set up the program I used to record myself talking while answering the prompt. I used a program on my laptop called iMovie because I knew that they had a voice recorder option that I have used before for previous projects. However, for future research, I would recommend using an easier program, such as a recorder on your phone. With iMovie, you can only enable the voice recording software when you have a photo or video to go along with it. So I placed 6 pictures in the iMovie project in the

Diaz 3 maximum number of time incriminates they allowed, which was 10 minutes. Thus, I had 60 minutes to record and write my response to my world history prompt. After setting up iMovie, I began writing my essay in the comfort of my dorm room, after all of my suitemates have gone to sleep for complete tranquility. While answering the prompt, I said everything that went through my mind regarding the prompt, my day, or other irrelevant comments in order to have appropriate data for my research that could really help my understanding of my own writing processes. After the hour was complete, I stopped writing and began the process of transcribing. I opened another word document and started to replay the audio recording. At the same time, I typed everything that I have said for the hour while I was responding to the World History Prompt. Occasionally, I would have to play it again to make sure I have written down everything I said. After copying down my thoughts, I was finally ready to start coding. I followed the code found in Appendix B. To code, I reread the transcript I made of my thoughts while I was writing the prompt, and sentence-by-sentence, I labeled them accordingly. For example, if I took a pause, I would label it P, or if I made an off topic comment, I would label it OT. While I was working on the coding process, I slowly started to notice a pattern in my writing. Findings My coding followed an interesting pattern that consisted of first, off topic comments and space fillers so I would have things to document for my research, followed by a distraction from talking so much, which would lead to frustration from not focusing on my writing prompt in front of me. After I became frustrated, there would be a pause for me to gather my thoughts and I would start typing again. Once Ive typed up a couple of sentences in silence, I would remember that I am suppose to say my thoughts aloud as Im writing, thus resulting in more irrelevant comments, distractions, and frustrations and allowing this cycle to happen over and over again. To further

Diaz 4 examine my findings, I counted the 5 main actions that were included in the cycle of my writing process. In the chart below, the first column explains the codes that I focused on to support the Code OT, U D F P SW/RR 18 4 18 42 61 pattern that Ive recognized. The codes OT, U, D, F, P, and SW/RR can be decoded in Appendix B. The second column shows how many times each code appeared in my transcript. It was interesting to see that I made the same number of off topic and frustrating comments and only 4 distraction comments. I noticed I only made a distraction comment after a period of

time rambling and saying things just for the sake of having something to write for my transcript. This was a little surprising to me because I felt that I would have counted more codes for D. This made me realize, instead of being distracted for a good amount of time, I found this assignment to be more frustrating. Most comments that I made out of frustration consisted of something about grammar, as well as comments that expressed how difficult it was to concentrate on my writing and say my thoughts aloud at the same time. Out of the 18 F comments, 5 of them were related to grammar. Looking over my World History essay, however, I still found a lot of grammar mistakes. It is important to note that whenever I would speak, there wouldnt be much substance, or in other words, relevant to the topic at hand. I spent the majority of my time with off topic and frustrating comments. To look at it at a different angle, I decided to calculate percentages of time I spend for each code. To see the pie chart, refer to Appendix D. I spent just under 4% of my time talking about grammar aloud. It was fairly obvious why I still had grammar mistakes in my essay because I barely spent anytime focusing on it. This may have contributed to the fact that my assignment wasnt to write a fantastic world history essay to turn in with this project. My assignment was to say what I was thinking aloud while writing, but I only made comments about 24% of the hour I spent answering the prompt. If I knew my assignment was to analyze my thoughts while writing,

Diaz 5 why would I talk so little? After reviewing my transcript once again (found in Appendix C), I realized that I made most of my comments in the beginning of the hour. The reason being, the assignment was fresh on my mind, and I wanted enough information to document and analyze after the hour was up. After about 20 minutes of writing, I slowly started to talk less and began to type silently more. The comments towards the end of the hour contained most of my grammar comments and comments about forgetting that I had to say my thoughts aloud. Now, how does this relate to the way I write? During the 60 minute writing period, I spent 72% of my time writing silently, taking pauses, and rereading the essay or prompt to myself. It is safe to say that I am the type of writer that needs complete silence to fully concentrate. Having this type of assignment where I had to talk and write at the same time, it was hard to focus on both. This could explain why I had so many grammar errors in my essay (found in Appendix A). I wasnt able to fully focus on the content of my writing because in the back of my mind, I knew that wasnt the only task that I needed to do.