History is My Favorite
Research is something that everyone must do, whether it’s researching which brand of dog food is the best or research for an academic essay. In order to get reliable information, it’s important to develop good research skills, not just for school but for everyday life. If you want to get a new life insurance policy, it’s important to research the best one and see what fits for you, but if you don’t have good researching skills or don’t research at all you can end up getting stuck with bad life insurance. I personally have done lots of research both formal and informal. I’ve researched things like which brands of food taste better, how to fall asleep faster, and I have also done formal research to get information for my academic essays. In elementary and middle school, I had to conduct some research for essays and projects which weren’t as hard as it is for high school and college, but it was a first step.
I have had to do a lot of formal research for both my high school and college classes which was hard at first since I had to use more scholarly resources but as I developed better research skills it became easier. My first essay in high school was to write a short essay on an event that has impacted my life. I was given a basic guideline to follow such as how many paragraphs I need to write and how each paragraph should have a topic sentence and 3 details with sub details. I wanted to write a good essay, so I did some informal research on how to make my essay better. I researched how to make my wording better, how to make more essay more interesting, and what I should or shouldn’t do when writing an essay. However, since it was a personal essay, I didn’t have to do a whole lot of research and just needed to focus on conveying the content in my memory through my writing to the best of my ability.
The first major essay I had to write was in my college English class when I was a sophomore. I had to pick a topic and write an argument essay on it. The topic that I chose was on whether year-round schools are more effective than semester-based schools. I had about two weeks to write it and had to conduct a lot of research on the pros and cons of both sides before I could compare them and make an argument. My research included things such as how high the average test scores were for each, how it will help lower class learning students, effects on mental health, and how it will affect other industries such as tourism, childcare, transportation, and food services. Some resources I used were scholarly articles I found on NC Live and books that I checked out from the school library.
While I did enjoy getting to conduct these kinds of research and getting to learn new writing techniques through them, my favorite kind of writing that I have done was in my World History class. Every test in that class was an essay we had to write on every goal answering different questions he would ask. A lot of these questions involved relating what we learned about to the modern world. For example, one of my favorite time periods to learn about was during ancient Rome and Greece. I had to write about how Greece and Rome’s ideas have influenced us through our ancestors. I wrote about how Greece contributed to and shaped our government through their democracy. If you look at our current government, you can see that it is very similar towards Greece’s back then with minor changes but still the same basic idea. I think it’s amazing how something that happened such a long time ago is still very apparent in modern society and being used.
After I read chapter 26 of The Norton Field Guide, I realized that my disciplinary interest is in the arts and humanities which was why I enjoyed my World History class so much. Writing in the arts and humanities “focus[es] on human culture and expressions of the human mind, and the purpose of writing in these fields is to explore and analyze aspects of the human experience across time” (Bullock et al. 307). It’s amazing to see how humans have evolved over time and how we are continuing to grow more and more.
Work Cited
Bullock, et al. Chapter 26: “Writing in academic fields of study.” The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings and Handbook. 5th ed. Norton, 2019. pp.307
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