Definition of History

At the beginning of this year a set some goals for both my writing and my research in history and I feel like I was able to accomplish them. For writing I wanted to able to write argumentative in a concise fashion. Even from my first essay I felt like I was improving, but it did take a couple more tries for me to be able to find the balance between being argumentative and factual thoughts. This was especially hard when we kept switching between the kinds of essays and reports. However, I feel like I have a pretty good idea of how I want to balance these two things for my final project. Research wise I think I was also able to improve through out the year. I found that when researching for a certain subject you need to gather all the sources you can and then start weeding through. This was very important lesson for my final project. I found this a lot easier than trying to weed sources out from the beginning (which is what I did for our first research paper). So overall my research paper writing skills improved drastically.
Apart from this writing improvement, I also learned how to like history. I was not a very big fan of history because to me it was just boring facts and dates I needed to memorize. Now I learned that history is not the study of the past but rather how we remember and record events. It actually made learning about these events a lot more interesting and exciting. This was, in fact, my favorite part about this class.