Analysis Of What Happened And Why Patrick Rael

Improved Essays
Reading the article “What Happened and Why?” by Patrick Rael, I personally thought that he was trying to educate us readers about how to write like a historian. However, the way he chose to convey the information was unclear and confusing. When I started to read the article I found it very difficult to connect. His thesis is a clear statement in the beginning, but his choice of words and grammar is hard to, as a reader, understand. Despite this, I was able to get useful information from his writing and, this paper with only with a few exceptions, will be helpful in the future writings.
Patrick Rael make is very clear good history papers start with questions. The questions are something that the author knows but the reader doesn’t. They should
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Patrick Real talks about six different questions, yet out of those six questions I find myself always asking myself, “Has the author structure his/her argument around the road map you have identified?” He states that “once you have built a 'road map' to the argument, you can then easily determine if the author has adhered to it.” I strongly believe that, yet when it comes to road mapping I find it quick difficult to do that because writers have to plan out there long and short term goals of what they are going to write about on a historical topic. Therefore, the other question is, “How is the argument made within each point?” This means breaking everything down in smaller sections to be able to evaluate the article. It helps readers to understand the authors “challenge” and “strategy” to see his argument by “discrete parts.” Yet, when I was analyzing his paper I found something very aberrant about his six questions out of his article. I agreed with all the questions except for, “What is the historical problem?” Something about how it is written confuses me and I do not understand what it means. He states that in the introduction or first chapter in the book are most like to find the authors historical problem. I understand to a point finding the author’s historical problem in the introduction, but how I was taught there problem will not just be identified in the introduction, but also in the middle of the argumentative paper. The reason why my old teacher said this was because it that is where conflicted and actions and problem start to rise, in the middle of the book or

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