This artifact is a pair of essays written for a history class in the spring of 2024, one addressing how Enlightenment ideologies helped spark World War I, and the other comparing and contrasting Communism and Fascism (though a fair chunk of it was spent trying to hammer out what those two ideologies are in finer detail, as they are often invoked as boogeymen in modern political discourse, which ultimately causes more harm to our sense of history than good). I chose this artifact to demonstrate Communication Competence because both essays examine available data, and present the conclusions drawn therefrom with relative straightforwardness and clarity. While some of the ideas presented therein (especially in the first essay) may be out of left field, as the saying goes, my main goal was not to present debate-winning arguments, but rather to clearly communicate concepts that may not cross the minds of many without some prompting. At the very least, it is an exercise in learning to synthesize information and put it to words in such a way that it is readily understood, and for any readers, it could be something to chew on for a while.

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I have never been personally a very clear communicator (I have mentioned elsewhere my tendency to pontificate and go off track from a starting subject very quickly), so this program outcome is something I have had to apply myself to develop. With all the writing I have had to do over the past few years, I have learned to refine and streamline my thought process when writing, and I think this artifact, being a more recent work, demonstrates that well.