Democracy Risks Tyranny and College Essay Reflection

Veronica Heinrich
My greatest struggle by far with my writing is organization. I struggle a lot with logical
flow and placement of paragraphs plus paragraph structure. My ideas tend not to flow
from one to the next as well as they could. In my Tocqueville essay one paragraph
regarded the importance of commonly held beliefs and common action to have a
functioning society. While the following paragraph claims, The only way to ensure that
a democracy does not evolve into a tyranny is through checks and balances. Neither
paragraph relates to each other nor included a transition into one another. I later changed
the second paragraph to discuss critical thinking and the willingness to be disturbed as it
flowed better with my previous ideas. From here on I will start fully outlining my essay
before I start writing so I can check to see if all my ideas are relevant to each other and if
it the paragraph and paragraph structure flow smoothly. To better link my ideas together
and improve the overall flow I will also improve my usage of transition sentences.
While I do not struggle with writing introductions, my goal is to improve writing thesis
statements that respond to the prompt in a direct way. I also struggle with keeping my
essay relevant to my thesis statement. For example my first thesis statement for my
Tocqueville essay stated, Even our founding fathers were concerned about the threat of
tyranny from the masses. Largely, our democracy functions well in protecting the rights
of its citizens, but there are times when it tyrannizes groups of them as well. This
original thesis introduced and covered some of what my essay would continue to propose,
but it was not broad enough to fully cover the extensive focus of how democracy risks
tyranny. To improve my future thesis statement craft I need to fully outline my TEA
paragraphs/essay so I can fully capture the extent to what I address and claim throughout
my paper. In the future I will first outline the claims I am making and then craft those into
a thesis statement.
I lack knowledge of when it is appropriate to use semi-colons within sentences. Again
using my Tocqueville essay as an example, in my first draft introduction I wrote,
However, as Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out in Democracy in America; tyranny can
also come from the rule of the majority over the individual and minority groups. Before
hand I did not understand that in order to use a semi-colon both sentences on either side
must be a full sentence, but after asking Lori this simple yet important semi-colon rule
was cleared up for me. I later replaced the semi-colon with a comma since the first
portion was not a complete sentence. In the future during the revision process I will be
sure to scope out all the semi-colons Ive used and check to see if they are joining two
complete sentences. I can achieve this by reading the sentences out loud and orally
clarifying to myself if they are both a complete sentence or not.
Throughout the process of writing my common application essay I struggled with the
organization of my paragraphs and connection between ideas. My first draft introduction
jumped from a story about being excluded due the way I look then to how my sister used
to dye her hair when we were young. The ideas didnt connect nor did they add to what I
was trying to portray about myself to college admissions. After getting feedback that my

essay didnt successfully and cohesively portray what I aimed to nor flow well, I had to
take on the task of reorganizing and breaking up my previous paragraphs. My ideas were
perfect; they just did not flow into one another in a way that made sense. In the end I
decided to only use my personal experience for my introduction and as a hook I wrote, I
felt the stares centered at my sleep-deprived head as I exited security in the Paris airport.
I saw a group of teens huddled together with their hefty suitcases introducing themselves
to one another. They would be my peers for the next month. I wondered, Why arent they
greeting me with smiles, too? Shy and timid, I sat by my overly-stuffed backpack waiting
for someone to approach me. The following topic sentence directly introduces what my
story was trying to portray and what the following essay will consist of. The next
sentence states, Later, after getting to know me, some group members remarked that
they initially assumed I was angry and/or scary due to my hairstyle and overall
appearance. In order to improve how I organized my writing, I fully re-outlined my
previous topics so I could reorganize my ideas in a way each idea could connect to one
another. Also, after this I added transition sentences to help paragraphs and ideas flow
smoothly into one another. I am very please with how my college essay turned out and it
helped me to understand my personal writing process and to learn how to organize my
writing better.