From writing weekly articles I have learned that a thesis is not easy to come by, and you have to keep working on the thesis so it can: 1.) Make sense 2.)Tell what you are thinking entirely and 3.) Get to the point. When I started off writing the weekly article responses my thesis’s were long and were made up of a lot of words that weren’t needed. My thesis writing began to improve and now they have a whole idea included in them. In my letter to Paul my thesis was “The United Nations should focus on stopping the Interhamwe because they are extremely dangerous to the people around and are armed with machetes.” I think this thesis is to the point and it explains what I am thinking, but can still use some work.
After thinking about a thesis for the Paul letter I also had to know a lot about the Rwandan genocide. I learned that in a conflict there are many sides of a story, and it is hard to determine who is responsible for the Rwandan Genocide because of the many people who played a role, like the Interhamwe or the MRND. The Interhamwe was to blame because they were the people that we killing victims on the street. But, the MRND might have been responsible because they wanted Hutu power and they were instructing the Interhamwe to kill the Tutsi’s.
Not only did I learn how to write letters I learned how to write stories and myths. From writing the group myths I learned that there are many perspectives that people can have on a certain topic. My group’s topic was the reason people die. And it was hard for us to decide on a reason. We brain stormed and thought that a good idea would be, a person to have a time clock and when their clock ran out they would die. But then the question was why would children die? My group and I went back to the drawing board and decided that each person would have a mission and when their mission was complete they would die. I learned that it is also hard to have a probable story that people would believe as well.
Throughout the year we had to write paragraph responses. I never knew that from writing two paragraph responses you could learn so much. From the paragraph response I learned that transitions bring your paper together and they are pretty much essential to have your paper make sense. When I wrote my first response I don’t think my paper had any transitions. But in my letter to Paul in the second paragraph was “Another reason the Interhamwe should be stopped is if they continue to kill people, they are most likely going to recruit civilians to kill more people,” Which moves the last paragraph to a new idea.
From paragraph response writing I also learned that it is important to eliminate clutter in your writing, which is taking out words or phrases that aren’t needed. In my first article response, my two paragraphs took up about two pages, and included a lot of information that wasn’t needed. As I started to write more responses I learned that your piece of writing makes more sense when you eliminate words. When you eliminate clutter it is easier to get your point across also.
Our last unit was about the area of South Africa. From the South African unit I learned that there was settling in South Africa, first for a port and later for minerals when gold and diamonds were found. When the British started to settle for the minerals, it forced the South African tribes to move north. The British kept getting in wars over the land and the minerals, but soon enslaved the South African natives. The natives worked on farms or the mined for the British people. The British later banned the black Africans from parliament and discriminated against them.
