To look at my progress of become a better auto ethnographer, I will examine ‘Veganism in Asia’, which investigated how South Korea adopts the term ‘veganism’ and my experience with that vague definition. This blog post didn’t quite follow Ellis’s writing as much as the previous post before it did, as I only drew from my own experience of the topic and couldn’t feel a way to tie his wisdom amongst it. So, looking back, ‘Veganism in Asia’ may have been weaker because I was unable to relate his reasoning into it. But I will be rectifying that in this post, where I will be attempting to look over my writing with his auto ethnographic approaches and theories.

Reading through Ellis’s finding after writing ‘Veganism in Asia’, I notice that my auto ethnography skills are still quite lacking. When I say this, I am referring to Mitch Allen’s statement of, ‘look at your experience analytically. Otherwise you’re just telling a story… and what makes your story any different’. (ALLEN, 2006 CITED IN ELLIS ET AL. 2011) That statement rings quite true to my writing of that post, as I didn’t really add anything, I just told a story of my time in South Korea, and that’s not specifically interesting for anyone.

Diving deeper into that previous thought of my post not being factual enough, I discovered additional comments on the matter from his paper. This time from his statement, ‘Layered accounts often focus on the author’s experience alongside data, and relevant literature. This ..emphasizes the ..nature of research’. (CHARMAZ, 1983 CITED IN ELLIS ET AL. 2011) This claim agrees with Allen’s statement previously outlined, and relates back to my work. It reminds me what I should be aiming to do to improve on the topic of auto ethnography. So from both, I gather that a story is okay, as long as it buried amongst facts and not stand alone. This will also enhance the facts and create an enjoyable read. The sources I chose to credit for my post, were not academic notes on the topic, merely blogs that were also supporting my narrative. If I can deepen my research, then I will instantly see improvements in my work.

To summarise this post, looking at both my blog about ‘Veganism in Asia’ and Ellis’s writing through wise auto ethnographic eyes, I can now see how I can improve my writing. This comes with the method of looking at further research on the matter, and to change my sources from simple secondary sources to more interesting-to-read sources to give my writing more of a factual edge. This will make it far less dull and possibly even enjoyable to read.

ELLIS, C., ADAMS, T.E., AND BOCHNER, A.P. (2011) ‘AUTOETHNOGRAPHY: AN OVERVIEW‘, FORUM: QUALITATIVE SOCIAL RESEARCH, 12:1.