THE BASIS OF MY REPORT

Over the past eight weeks, I have conducted an autoethnographic study on the ability of poetry to both evoke emotion from the reader, pathos, and express emotion from the writer, ethos. To accurately complete this, I have been drawing on my personal experiences as a reader of poetry and writing a series of my own poetry and posting it to social media platform, Instagram. This allows me to study poetry as both the audience and the composer. Throughout the course of my research, I have made three significant observations regarding my niche and content. The first epiphany was the realisation that commitment to consistency is difficult. My social networking often fluctuated from large portions of content to long periods of little to no publishing.  This in turn affected my engagement which is the centre of my second epiphany. My engagement with my posts ranged from 1-4 likes and zero comments or further activity with them, however, this must be viewed in the context of only having 15 followers on the account. From these numbers, I have further reflected on how personal experiences will make some content more relatable to some than others. The third and final epiphany was the difficulty in deciding what content to write. Throughout this study, I constantly pondered whether to change up the style of writing I was pushing out or to continue with a common theme. I think changing up the style would definitely increase engagement, however, struggling with my consistency, I found it difficult to find the time to do this. Through this ethnographic study, I researched and have loosely applied conflict theory to further understand my audience. Conflict theory is the idea that you can analyse groups into sectors such as gender, race and personal experiences; to further consider the conflicts that exist among them, to better understand your audience. To support this, I researched a study that “investigated how performing competitive poetry aids in the resolution of internal conflict in poetry slam participants” (Maddalena, 2009). Their research found that for slam poets to be successful with their peers, they must “write and revise their content with the audience in mind, and experience mutuality with the audience” (Maddalena, 2009). From this, we can draw the same conclusions about writing poetry in the sense that I did, as it is from a mutual background that vulnerable conversations are created and therefore, stronger engagement with the text is formed. From this reflection, I am going to apply my analysis to my DA in several ways. The main ones are, evolving my content to ensure it can resonate with the entirety or at the very least, the majority of my audience; and committing to regularly posting two to three times a week. My effort toward both these factors will hopefully increase my engagement and grow my audience overall; to provide significantly improved, final feedback on my task submission.