Wildania Brito
If I thought writing a narrative essay was tough, the historiography research blew my mind away. I have never researched so many sources up especially for fried chicken and its history. The only time I ever search up fried chicken is to find a place near me, but never to find sources that will contribute to a historiography essay. Finding sources, not one but a minimum of 5 was difficult because I had never done this before, I did not know where to begin. My task was to describe how the stereotype of black people loving fried chicken came about. Writing this historiography essay proved to me that I had strengths I was not aware of. It also proved to me that I had many skills to work on in order to improve my writing.
Once again in this essay, my analytical skills came in handy. Before skimming through my sources I made a list of words that would contribute to my essay, for example, slavery, African Americans, fried chicken, and southern chicken. After skimming through a source and carefully looking for these words, I quickly realized whether this source was going to be useful to me or not. After choosing my core sources I began to read every word carefully, again I used the technique of reading twice to get a better understanding of the context. My diction skills came in handy for when I began to actually write the essay. For the writing portion of this assignment I had made a perfect outline and thanks to that I was able to organize my thoughts and ideas into one page.
It was easy for me to input interesting details in the introduction to grab the attention of the audience. I was aware that nowadays race and stereotypes are a concept people, especially the youth, are woke about.
Although, there were many perfected skills that went into writing this essay I had a tough time as well. As shown the most difficult part of this essay was the choosing of the correct and perfect sources that will without a doubt support your thesis. I found myself switching sources twice, one for the media source and one of the scholarly articles I was supposed to incorporate into my writing. I had not investigated one source so thoroughly than I did with this essay, so I started to look for the media source and the non-scholarly articles first which were easy for me. I left the scholarly articles and the books for last because there was not much concrete information on how the stereotype of black people and the fried chicken came about, I was frustrated.
I explored almost all the rhetorical situations and it showed it was not that difficult to identify. The motivation for writing this essay was to inform not only myself but about the reader about this particular stereotype that has been around for ages and almost nobody knows where it comes from. My genre was non-fiction because of course, I am speaking about a topic that actually happened in history and that is still affecting us today. The feedback of my peers helped me a great lot in this essay. We have a group chat to help each other out with work, specifically, essays like this and some of their strengths were passed on to me after critically analyzing my work. The editing became much easier for me after their constructive criticism came into the picture.
To conclude, writing and creating this historiography essay made me a stronger writer and researcher. The skills I developed writing this essay was many that I did not have before. Looking for all types of sources, identifying which ones contributed something to my writing, and actually constructing this extensive and informative research paper highlighted my strengths and helped me find new ones. Having the ability to deeply analyze a source is a must for becoming a lawyer and I want to be the best darn lawyer there is.
