How to Write Like an Anthropologist

As we turned in our Project 3’s and suddenly realized that we had somehow made it to Project 4, it was worry rather than relief that filled our minds. How would we pick which Project 3 to convert into a video? What are we even going to include in our video? How can we have a sense of equity among our team members, especially at this incredibly busy time? Most importantly, though, how would we adapt the most academic and nuanced project yet, a case study of how to write in a highly specific disciplinary community, to a popular audience? This question represented our group’s driving force in producing our video because the central goal was to be able to say that we had successfully made “How to Write Like an Anthropologist” relevant to a large and diverse group of people and that we had equipped this new and popular audience with real tools and rhetorical techniques for writing in anthropology. With these motivations, we discovered that the ultimate importance of our video was not only transforming its argument into a popular context, but also recognizing for ourselves the significance and importance of adaptability in academic writing as yet another building block of scholarly work.

The majority of our project was built on adapted rhetorical choices chosen together by our group members, the first being which project we felt was best to adapt into the form of a video. When choosing which Project 3 to adapt, together we had to ensure that the material had the potential to be transformed from appealing to a scholarly audience to a popular audience. After analyzing all three Project 3’s we all came to the unanimous conclusion that Maclane’s Project 3 had the best potential to appeal to a popular audience, while still following the central purpose of the project which answered the question, “How do you write like an Anthropologist?”. Her focus on comparing and contrasting qualitative and quantitative data used to support anthropological research and writing was a theme that we thought we could adapt well when transforming the written work into a video format. We also all saw the potential with the primary evidence Maclane used, that being the work of Dr. Folmar, which would grant us a larger exigence and purpose to the conversation at hand.

After deciding which Project 3 we were going to adapt, the true challenge at hand was deciding where to begin. We all came to our first workshop with a variety of ideas of where to go regarding organization, evidence to support our thesis, and some rhetorical techniques that we wanted to use, but the problem remained: where do we even begin? It was not until we all started brainstorming together on our Google Doc where we created an arbitrary storyboard and shitty first draft of a script to get a solid start on the project itself. Due to incredibly busy academic schedules that week, our “shitty-first-draft-workshop” was certainly a shitty-first-draft because we were unable to film or put anything together other than the storyboard and script prior to class. Though our peers provided us with a lot of feedback on our skeleton of a project, we knew that we needed to come to our next workshop with a video to present that would garner the feedback we needed.

Our second in-class workshop was where we discovered from peer feedback that our thesis and purpose was slightly off; we had focused too much on discussing Dr. Folmar’s anthropological works and anthropology as a subject rather than answering the question of how to specifically write like an expert in the field. This disconnect was thankfully pointed out by both our peers and Professor G, and this realization led us to the core section of the revision process, which included revising both the script so that it would address the concrete and rhetorical patterns of anthropological writing, the evidence presented so that viewers could see Dr. Folmar’s work and understand the various genres of other anthropologists’ work, and the general formatting of our video so that the organization would guide our viewers on a path of continual meaning.

Since we chose Maclane’s piece, she took the reins on editing the script to make it more linear and consistent with our core exigence of the project. To truly make our audience understand the essential purpose of the video, Maclane added in specific details like the three steps deliberately listed for how to write like an anthropologist. On top of that, Marie added in the discussion of genres and how varying genres will be adapted by anthropologists to appeal to their intended audience which is entirely situational. By not only discussing Dr. Folmar’s fieldwork and research in general and adding parts such as how Dr. Folmar uses specific rhetorical tactics and techniques to appeal to his deliberate audiences, we were able to reiterate the video’s thesis, which focused on methodological balance and interdisciplinary collaboration as the pillars of understanding how to write in anthropology.

Emmie emphasized to us the importance of adding text and captions to give more clarity to specific parts of our video. Uncovering the rhetorical techniques and rhetorical trends within a disciplinary community like anthropology can be overwhelming, especially in the form of a video that is meant to appeal to a popular audience; therefore, we found it was necessary to add text on some images and videos to reiterate what we were saying on the voice over. A specific example of this technique is when listing off “the three things to remember when writing like an anthropologist”. Those three points are the three main takeaways from our video, therefore we felt as though they needed to be mentioned not only through voice over, but also visually through text. We wanted this formula of auditory information plus visual information to equal a more comprehensive and impactful takeaway for the audience. When demonstrating the complex and multilayered types of data, both quantitative and qualitative, through the cootie catcher, we had to label each video to clearly display which demonstration was which type of data. Emmie pointed out that there were many instances where text was needed for varying reasons stretching from emphasis to simple clarity, and these captions added a much-needed element of continued and improved meaning to the video.

With the purpose of uncovering the rhetorical techniques used in anthropological writing, the content discussed in the video mainly revolves around scholarly information and lacks some excitement; therefore, we had to take the scholarly content and adapt it to make it appeal to a more popular audience by using moving images, transition effects, and animation to engage our popular audience and to provide them with essential movements and images in the video that they could relate to central points in the thesis. The information could be relayed through still images and voice overs only, but with that we lost the interest of a popular audience looking for interactive evidence. We added in videos like the drawing of the tree, the cootie catchers, videos of the anthropology building, and videos of Dr. Folmar’s actual works to break up the 8 minutes of still images. By doing so, we hoped to be able to draw a more popular audience in and grasp the lost attention of those who were losing interest through the still images.

Though the result of our project met our initial expectations, the process did not go without challenges. The primary challenge that we faced was finding an ideal time that fit into everyone’s incredibly busy final schedules to meet up and work together on the video. There were times where only the two out of three of us could meet, but the occasional inability to fluidly communicate all of our ideas face to face caused a general disconnect at times. Another road block that unexpectedly came up was Marie getting violently sick with the stomach bug the day before the final video was due, which not only caused her to miss the group meeting with Professor G, but also prevented her from being able to give immediate feedback on the additions and edits to the video as planned. Despite some logistical struggles, we overcame these conflicts through constant communication on the Google Doc, which allowed all of us to be aware of every change that was made at any given time to both the script and the storyboard.

Looking forward, we as a group can take some valuable lessons from this process. We learned how to work together to best convey one message, and sometimes, this is the most difficult task in group work, yet, we maintained the ability to communicate with each other effectively. We learned how to capitalize on each other’s strengths to produce a well-rounded and interesting video, and though it seemed difficult at first, we were able to capture the main ideas and exigence of Maclane’s case study in a visual format. The workshops guided our process by showing us elements that were lacking in the video and by giving us new ideas on how to execute our plans in a way that engaged our viewers. We can’t wait to show our video and see everyone’s final projects because each group had multiple and varied ways of demonstrating the ability to use visual representations in a popular manner while discussing a scholarly topic.

Project 4 taught us academic writing and other scholarly works are not confined to one medium or genre. In fact, one of the most essential characteristics of academic writing should be its adaptability as this trait proves crucial to scholars’ opportunity to broaden their audiences and share their findings with more of the world. This takeaway was even closer to our group’s hearts because anthropological writing especially depends on genre adaptability to connect an anthropologist’s research to his or her greater social exigence. Our next question is: will our video be effective in educating a popular audience on how to write like an anthropologist? If yes, then how can continue to approach our academic writing with a mindset of adaptability and keeping in mind unintended audiences? If no, what needed to change and why?

Marie Cahalane, Emmie Davidson, and Maclane Paddock