[This paper was delivered on the panel “Embracing the Anxiety of Influence in Writing Studies Research” with Jo Mackiewicz, Jenn Fishman, and Karen Lunsford at last week’s Conference on College Composition and Communication. Enjoy!]

Hi everyone. As the only grad student on this panel, I was brought on to make the subject of qualitative data analysis more palatable and more accessible. I hope this talk will be especially useful to anyone who is beginning or considering qualitative data analysis, or educators beginning to train their graduate students in qualitative methods. In this talk I’m going to discuss how I came to embrace qualitative methods, and how my background in creative writing has helped me make sense of them. I hope my analogy between qualitative methods and creative writing might be a useful way of conceptualizing the hard work and the rewards of what researchers do.

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