Victoria Saucedo

RWS 3355
March 20, 2016
Professional Ethnography Reflective Essay
Although monotonous and tiresome at times, reading all these article really helped me
understand how to properly conduct my ethnographic project. Some readings that I found most
difficult throughout this portion of the semester during weeks six and seven would probably be
the articles by Porter, Swales, Khan, and Driscoll. From Porter, I learned how we as writers tend
to kind of continually borrow other writers ideas, words, and thoughts through intertextuality.
Also in this concept, it was crucial to recognize how every single word included by a writer
should contribute to the overall purpose and importance of the message. Regarding Swales, it
was a little challenging to understand the difference between a speech community and a
discourse community at first glance. However, I eventually understood how they differed in such
that a speech community has sorts of linguistic rules whereas discourse communities usually
do not. This article was important in recognizing how people and audiences in these several
different speech communities may speak the same language, but understand messages quite
differently. In the article by Driscoll, I learned how to appropriately and effectively conduct
observations and research for my ethnographic project. For instance, Driscoll helped me
understand the importance of having a most unbiased perspective and tone when observing and
recording my gatherings. Lastly, Kahns article informed me of how to respect my participants
privacy and reputations by recognizing that throughout this project, I would be analyzing and
studying actual human beings with feelings and emotions instead of a set of random data.

In the process of gathering data for my ethnographic project, something that surprised me
regarding the methodologies was how the classroom and workplace environments managed to
share so many similarities despite the differences in location and communities. For instance, I
wasnt expecting the Human Resource professor and manager to commonly agree so tightly on
almost every single subject our question raised. The only really thing that they seemed to differ
on was the best practice of communication within the separate environments. This makes sense
since within the two communities exist different goals. I think this was very helpful for my
project because it showed how students must transition and learn to adjust their communication
styles when entering the workplace community. It also makes very clear the expectations,
responsibilities, roles, lexis, and both formal and informal rules that one must learn in the HR
community. This is why I think that I adequately accomplished the goal of the assignment: to
help people understand how to communicate within the Human Resource field. Not only did I try
to be informative, but I also tried to address my audience in such a way that they could easily
understand and retain this load of new information. Overall, I believe my writing process
facilitated my progress since I made sure to organize and prepare my information in an
efficiently presentable form. Each section was set apart and addressed different areas of
communication in the Human Resource field. There were also helpful comparisons and contrasts
between the classroom and workplace environments.
I did not really make any drastic changes in-between drafts. A couple things that I
adjusted were things such as making new paragraphs, making a visual aid in terms of a lexis
chart, clarifying one or two points with specific examples, and fixing or removing certain words
and sentences throughout the guide. In this way, I believe that my revision process proved to be
most effective by trimming some loose edges here and there, resulting in a final product that I

believe will be perceived as informative, organized, understandable, and helpful. In the end, this
entire project helped me learn how to effectively communicate considering different situations,
environments, rules, and people. Most of all, it helped me to also understand how to
communicate within my anticipated field of Human Resource, giving me a very advantageous
insight which I am sure will help me in my future career and pursuits.