What the ethnography exercise has helped me realize most about myself as a writer is that the quality of my writing and will to write is very inconsistent. I feel like sometimes I’ll sit down for hours and nothing can come to my mind, and sometimes I just have the urge to spit something out on paper (or screen, more often). I thought it was interesting to reflect on what was going on around me as I was writing. While I didn’t notice a major effect on my writing based on the location, background noise, etc, I liked looking back and seeing what could have been the factor that resulted in writing better or worse. I feel that what has developed most about my writing this semester is that I can do much better with writing independently from a text. I think that in high school almost every assignment was significantly longer and was pretty much just assessing my interpretation of the texts we were reading. Especially in my Philosophy and Theology classes, I feel like I was tasked with illustrating my own thought more than I ever have before. What the ethnographic study has helped me with is understanding that I can’t force myself to write, at least not well. This can be difficult with deadlines, but I think I need to be a little more patient with my writing process in order to maximize my outcome.
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