What I've Learned

Before this year, I think that my writing was argumentative, but I think that my thesis statements were not very strong and did not well represent my persuasive, argumentative writing. I think that this year I learned to develop more concise, argumentative,  and representative thesis statements.  This overall makes my papers much stronger and makes it easier to organize my evidence in a way that makes sense and makes it easy to read. I also think that I consistently provided too much background information and factual evidence before getting to my point. One example of this was in my paper about feminists this year. I had about a page an a half of unneeded background information. After cutting this, and reforming my thesis, my written paper was much stronger. This year my writing improved, but it was mostly my organization of my papers and making it concise so that it was easy to read and made sense, that improved. My ideas also greatly improved this year. I feel as though the things that we learned were much less factual and memorizing than history classes in the past. I think that our class discussions made me really think deeper into the surface of these historical events. Mostly I think that this new outlook showed up in my writing. One of the papers that I was most proud of this year actually occurred at the beginning of the year. We had spent time in class discussing current events and we had to write a paper linking some of these events into a common theme. The theme that I chose was ethnic nationalism. I think that this beginning of the year paper really helped me to think of history in a new way for the rest of the year, and the years to come. Before this class, I would have probably just read these current events off of my Yahoo page and absorbed them, but not thought much about them. Now I am able to see connections between different things happening in the world at different times and how these patterns have repeated throughout history. I think that this new outlook makes me appreciate history even more, and makes it a much more interesting class.