Dear Reader,
Restaurants consist of two worlds: the world they portray to their customers and the backstage, more secret world. The money that servers make in tips is usually their entire income and paycheck due to taxes, therefore each time a person eats at a restaurant and leaves a measly two or three dollars to represent their gratitude, those dollars are noted and cherished. My paper attempts to look deeper into the backstage world of waitressing and the tactics they utilize to raise their tip income. The readers of my paper I would assume to be servers who are a part of the backstage restaurant life looking for new and useful ways to raise tips or people who are generally interested in the culinary world. I hope that this paper proves to be insightful and informative about the restaurant world.
Although I am such a person who is interested in the culinary world, I seriously struggled while deciding on a topic. My study topic initially dealt with the affect that students’ parents’ discipline theories in high school had on students’ partying tendencies in college. However, after realizing that this topic is not in compliance with IRB regulations, I switched my topic to the social pressures and discrimination experienced by lesbian and gay students. Unfortuneately, this topic does not follow IRB regulations either, so I again changed my topic… this time to the issue of airport security and the general public’s opinion of the system. After deciding that asking people in an airport what their impression of the security system is might be intrusive and possibly disturbing to many airport travelers, I decided on my topic regarding restaurant serving and the tipping phenomenon.
The planning that I put into my project was in a very organized fashion. I began by researching different studies that dealt with my topic and formulating my review of literature. After having a base of knowledge to deal with this topic, I decided on three restaurants to observe the servers and their interactions with the customers.
Because I struggled so much with deciding on a topic, I was helped by comments and suggestions of my teacher and by looking at examples of different ethnography studies. I also read different studies to get an idea of how they wrote and organized their article.
Kelly Terry
Your introduction establishes the topic of your paper but it is hindered by your confusing sentence structure. Sentences such as "The money that servers make in tips is usually their entire income and paycheck due to taxes, therefore each time a person eats at a restaurant and leaves a measly two or three dollars to represent their gratitude, those dollars are noted and cherished" are not only too long, but are worded very confusingly. Your sentence would be more effective if it read something like this, "As a result of taxes and the fact that servers usually work for minimum wage, they generally only profit off of the tips that they receive. For this reason, servers appreciate each and every dollar that customers leave behind." Your section on the process of choosing a topic is very effective as you go into detail about the complications that you ran into with IRB regulations.
ReplyDeleteYour paper so far is living up to most of what your process note claims it will. However, incorporating the research that you conducted will greatly strengthen your argument. Again be careful of sentence structure. Read the paper aloud to yourself and reword any sentences that are hard to say or that are difficult to find the meaning of.
Overall, your paper is coming along very nicely. Keep up the good work!