Prompt and Minimum Requirements
In MLA format, write autoethnography of 6-10 pages* exploring some interesting aspect of your relationship with a particular culture, subculture, community, profession, or other group, whether the group engages in formal or informal ways, whether face-to-face or virtual. Here are some things your essay must do.
Be at least 6 full pages but no more than 10
Be carefully edited. Slang and other intentional stylistic choices are okay, particularly if you are clearly writing with a vocabulary that is supposed to reflect the way people communicate in the community you are writing about. What is NOT okay are typos and other unintentional errors. Work very hard to eliminate them, using all tools available to you to remove them in editing before submission.
Use subheadings to break the essay into useful sections. Have an introduction section, a few body sections, and some kind of concluding section each marked with a creative subheading. (All the example authoethnographies do this, so you have many models.)
Blend traditionally academic writing and narrative writing, following the models provided to you. That means you should be using academic methods of providing research but also find ways to pivot and draw in readers with evocative narrative as a means of helping readers understand the experiences of your community. The examples all do this.
Use at least 3 highly credible sources to help you explain the selected group, its activities/practices, and/or issues that relate to it (like ideas the group holds or conflicts that exist in and around such communities). You could also use the sources to help you explain aspects of your relationship to it. For instance, if you feel alienated from it, you could use a source to help explore the experience of alienation. In other words, the sources do not have to be on the specific community itself, but will help your reader better understand the things you’re writing about.
Include in-text citations AND a Works Cited page. These do not “count” as pages in the page count noted above.
