Writing Your Ethnography

4.1 Writing Your Ethnography

See the following example ethnographies located on this site or on Canvas. 

• "Friday Night at the Iowa 80"  Good example of how you can start your ethnography (the introduction), incorporate interviews, and organize your observation section.

• "Dunleavy's Pub" This ethnography does well in the observation section at the beginning of the paper (through the interview) with both writing style and organization. 

• "Exploring the Zoo" This ethnography does well with the observation section, but is a particularly good example of how to write the scholarly section of your paper. 

• "The School Parking Lot: A Parent’s Quest" This ethnography does well with the observation section, interview, and scholarly section. 

You can copy the style of these ethnographies to whatever degree you would like.

Tips for Writing Your Ethnography

This is a long paper, and it will be important that you give yourself enough time to write it. You can find the specific requirements and guidelines on the Ethnography assignment on the Project 1 Assignment page. You may find it easier to break up your ethnography in two parts:

Part 1 (4-5 pages): Observation Section

The first part of your paper can focus on your observations, describing your community, and informing your reader about your community. It will be helpful to have some ideas of what is important to let your reader know about your community before you start writing. While this section of your paper can be a type of creative non-fiction writing, it should still have a clear focus for information someone about who your community is and what they are all about. 

Your interview may be in this section or you may find that you want to break it up into several areas of your paper. 

Part 2 (around 4 pages): Scholarly Section

This second part of your paper is where you can focus on the issue that impacts your community that you further researched. This section should have a clear thesis (main point that you are making about this topic). It should also be organized around sub-points, use topic sentences to clearly convey what each paragraph is about, paraphrase evidence and cite sources to support those sub-points, and include a discussion or analysis of the research to explain to the reader the point(s) you are trying to make with the research. When possible, it will also strengthen your paper to connect those ideas back to your community or observations. 

What Else Should My Ethnography Include?

Your ethnography should also include a title page, in-text citations, and a reference page with your sources (all in APA style). If you would like, you can also include photos from your community throughout the paper (see "Friday Night at the Iowa 80" for ideas on how this might look). 

Understanding Research Writing as a Genre

While your ethnography will also include some writing that might be more journalistic narrative for the observation section, the scholarly section of your paper will be closer in writing style and format to a typical research paper.  

The first step in learning how to write a research paper is to understand it as a distinct genre. For those of you unfamiliar with that term in this context, a genre is a way to categorize artistic compositions, such as writing, artwork, music, etc. When we are talking about the concept of genre in an academic writing setting, we are looking at all forms of writing as distinct genres with their own set of conventions (or the expectations that the reader will have when reading it). While argumentative essays and research papers may have some similarities, as they are both academic genres, they are not the same genre. They have different sets of conventions that will need to be followed in order for them to be successful. 

For example, in an argumentative essay, you might use logic or your own experiences as your primary evidence. A typical academic research paper, by its very nature, must contain research, and with few exceptions, that research should be scholarly and peer-reviewed. Research papers will, however, have differences based on the discipline. For example, how one writes a research paper for a history class will not be the same as how one writes a research paper in a literature class or a microbiology class. But for our purposes, we're going to look at the more broad category of academic research papers that students will find in their first few years of college. 

Since students have typically written essays before taking this class, there can be some confusion around how research papers differ from these other commonly assigned academic papers. The following list of conventions is not exhaustive but will hopefully help you see the differences. 

As you begin planning and drafting your research paper, pay attention to these conventions. I also recommend you look at the articles that you are reading for ideas around how research writing should look. While some of your research may be primary research in the form of a study, much of it will likely be articles that are discussion other research that's already been done. These articles will be more similar to what you're expected to write in undergraduate classes than academic essays (which are a much different genre). 

Additionally, the following reading discusses the idea of argument in writing, which as you will see, gets more complicated with research writing when you're attempting to remain unbiased as a writer.