Lay of the Land

The essay "Lay of the Land" by Nicole Williams is a very good essay and example of an ethnography. Her chosen site of research is a bowling alley.  She uses many details in her explanations of the people that she sees at the bowling alley, especially in the men and women's bowling leagues that take place on Monday nights. Her explanations are much in depth and help to paint a clear image in the readers mind of the bowling alley and the types of people who go to the bowling alley. Although her details are very informative, I feel that there might be too many at times and some of them may be irrelevant. For example, the sentence, "The final member of the team is a man who is in his late 20’s or early 30’s and is wearing shorts, despite the cold weather outside, a HHH sleeveless shirt and has a gold hoop in his ear. HHH is a professional wrestler, so it is obvious that this man likes to watch wrestling.  Wrestling starts at 8 o’clock on Monday nights, so he will probably be leaving in time to get home and watch" does a good job explaining the mans overall appearance and interests however it is unnecessary in this essay because the essay is about bowling leagues not what time wrestling is on tv. She does an excellent job describing the setting of the essay and how the bowling alley looks. Towards the middle, she starts to talk about the actual leagues more which I think is the main fucus of the essay. The detail of the bowling alley, food, concession stands and etc are great. It seems to me like she wrote this essay based on 1 to 2 visits, but with those visits it is clear that she took a lot of notes. I think she did a great job on this ethnography however for the future I think she should talk more about the actual leagues and less detail about all the people.