December 11, 2015

Dear Reader,
English 113A is the first English class that I took in CSUN. English 113A is a
freshmen class that most of the students are having trouble on their writing style. We have
SI after English class which helped me a lot with writing.
The first essay we wrote is narrative essay, when I heard about the topic was on
something about language, I wrote about how I change one language to another language
when I was in elementary school. The third essay we wrote is argumentative essay about
social media apps, in this essay I wrote about how social media apps negatively affecting
our daily living style.
The most challenging when I was writing this two essay is hard to stay on topic
and have less idea. I overcome these challenge by using bubble map to brainstorm.
Brainstorm is very important to start your essay
Peer revision is my most favorite part of revision on essay, it gave me the chance
to look at other peoples paper and see more what they wrote about; that will give me
some idea what do I need to add to my paper. The other thing I like about peer revision is
that it gave other people to revise my paper and comment on the paper that what problem
I need to fix.
The process that I revise my paper is that I will read all the comment that the
professor and classmates gave me. Then I will edit my paper and bring it to the LRC.
After I got feedback from LRC, I will revise and read it out loud to see my grammar
mistakes. Each time I read it out loud, I always found some mistake. I got many grammar

mistakes; most of them are comma splice and past/present tense. Those mistake has
bother me since in high school.
I notice that my weakness when I was writing both essay is that I always get stuck
on one kind of idea and cant think about others idea. When I was writing the social
media apps essay, my brain was stuck on face to face interaction; when I went to look for
source and I found many ideas about my topic.
I learn about my writing is when I start writing my essay; I need to brainstorm
about the topic first and then write. Another thing I learn is that essay is based on your
quality of your essay and not quantity.
My writing style changed a lot after I took this class, the most I change is that
now I doesnt stay on one specific topic, I will go wider on that topic. I think my writing
has improved, the most I improved is making less grammar mistake.

Sincerely,
Zijing Zhao