A Mild Face Lift for a Failure of an Essay

Here's the absolutely atrocious original intro paragraph from my in class essay:

- As we can see from Adichie's TED talk, "The Danger of a Single Story", people are guilty of making preemptive assumption before knowing the whole story. Marjane Satrapi shows us that even the most open minded of individuals are guilty of this fallacy in her graphic novel The Complete Persepolis. One of the single stories presented in the novel is of the ex-leader of Iran, the Shah, as well as all the abhorrent deeds described in The Complete Persepolis. Throughout the novel, we only ever see the bad side of the Shah.

Here's a (hopefully) less atrocious version of the intro paragraph:

- In her graphic novel, The Complete Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi's depiction of the Shah shows us that even the most open minded of individuals are guilty of stereotyping with a single story. From the very beginning of the book, Marjane introduces Iranian government as oppressive and stifling in the story "The Veil". Starting from the fourteenth page, the Shah is explicitly introduced as the power hungry leader of Iran to whom everyone directs their hate. She tells the readers of the Shah's unscrupulous ways in the stories: The Bicycle,  The Water Cell, and Persepolis. However, she doesn't say anything remotely positive about the ex-leader of Iran even once. The single story of the Shah is proof of the split between the leader and the people that can occur due to a story that's only partially told.

In my original in class essay, I noticed that I was somewhat at a loss of words concerning examples to use for my argument. Since I was distracted by my lackluster idea as well as the looming deadline, my writing was very stiff and formulaic, yet disorganized. In my opinion, it had the dryness of a middle school paper without the organization. In short, my essay was dreadful. One of the problems with my intro paragraph was the fact that it was missing a "road map", a user's manual going over the different examples to be used in the essay. I tried to make it more structured by finding a few relevant stories (chapters?) from the book. Also, I was overly concise, or should I say hasty, with the presentation of my reasoning. That was a more simple fix, I just added in some extra meat on those bones to make the introduction a little bit more palatable.

The moment I read the blog assignment for 24/9/15 (found here: http://rathskg.blogspot.com/),  I knew that I was going to be in for a rough ride. I'm very critical of writing, especially bad writing, and even more so if it's my own bad writing. Most of the time my writing isn't embarrassing enough to make me cringe too much, however, reading my essay was arduous. I can tell that I was not nearly prepared enough for the assignment, and I wasn't even fully convinced of the point I was arguing! Knowing myself (fairly well, I think), I would say that I am capable of crafting a quite convincing argument, provided that I care about what I am arguing about. If I were to rewrite the essay, I would spend more time finding an argument that I personally feel for, so that I can put more life and fluidity into my writing. From this experience, I think that I will strive to keep myself relaxed and keep myself from being too terse when explaining my thoughts. I often tend to omit things, whether from the fear of being too verbose or from plain laziness.