Progress Report after First Complete Working Draft

It feels really good to have my first working draft completely finished. All of the hard work is done, and now I am working on fine tuning all of my comments, prose, and analysis.

I think that the more personal, and transparent I am with my examples of microcultural conflict, the more successful my research will be. I think my draft grew exponentially stronger by adding full texts excerpts from my blog, the rambler, and my journal. Rather than looking back on an experience, the raw emotion, and detail from that exact point strengthens the argument and the details of the example. It makes my point much clearer to the reader, who may or may not have gone through similar instances, but I think they will be able to understand my perspective much better. In addition, it ties it back to auto-ethnography and keeps my research true to my genre of choice. My writing group feedback agreed that the in text excerpts really clarify my argument.

One thing that I am currently working on expanding after the writing group discussion, is my analysis of the interviews. There were not any surprises in my interviews, knowing the microcultures of where my interviewees are from I had a pretty good idea of how they would respond. I expected there to be one or two outliers to my overall thesis, but there were not any. This is in my opinion blatant as it pertains to my thesis because it reinforces the issue that I am discussing, and  clearly states that there is an issue with microcultural communication. However, my writing group thinks that I am currently just letting the interviews stand alone. I did this intentionally because I didn't want to seem biased about the responses, but after re-reading through this section of the research, I agree it can benefit from some analysis, and retying it back to my thesis.

I am also currently deciding on how I want to deal with this idea of assimilation. I know it is a soft spot for many scholars in this field. However based on my interviews, and my personal experience, I have decided that assimilation is the word that I want to use. Some of my interviewees used the word "compromise" and "life adjustments", and I think that this point made by my personal experiences and the interviews can best be summarized by the word assimilation. My point here that I am making is that it is solely the job of the outsider to make adjustments in order to fit into the new microculture. Since you are the minority, you are expected to conform to fit the majority in order to facilitate communication. I wish this was not the case and could do a complete other paper on alternatives to this concept, why it is an issue, and how to fix it. However, for the purposes of this project determining if, and why there is a communication issue, making this statement about how people from different microcultures learn to communicate, is as far as I will go into discussing it because there is not enough time to give the entirety of this concept justice in this paper.