Dear Distinguished Reader:

English was never in my area of expertise, as I have always struggled in grammar and punctuations. When I was a kid, I always hated writing and reading as I found it tedious and boring at the time. I never even tried revising as I found it difficult to remember all the grammatical corrections. My mom mostly spoke to me and my sister in Tagalog, and mostly in broken English, even up to this day. As I constantly heard the way my mom spoke to me, I got used to speaking the same way as my mom. I always found it infuriating when I was faced with an essay. However, the reason why I found it hard to create essays or correct sentence level errors was due to the fact that I have a "bad" memory. At the age of 10 I had a brain tumor called "Medulablastoma". Apparently years after I had surgery my mom and my sister noticed that I lost focus easily, and that I forgot memories or events easily. My struggle in English intensified as I went to middle school as I graduated from 5th grade while missing over half a year of school. During middle school I received my essays with just a letter grade with no corrections at all. I wasnt able to learn from my mistakes, so I kept making the same error. When I first entered my English course, English 113A, at Cal State University Northridge I was so nervous. I was afraid of failing every essay, and that I would have to retake the course the following semester. However, professor Lace and Emily gave me the best learning experience, and unlike most of my teachers in my previous years, Professor Lace and Emily took their time and corrected my essays. In groups we learned to correct commonly misused commas, semi-colons, and sentence level errors which we wrote on posters. Another reason was that I learned to create a Toulmin style paragraph which helped me clarify and organize my essays. Thanks to professor Lace and Emily I find English a lot easier, and I will definitely be using what they taught me in the future! I feel more enlightened that I have learned to create a more reasonable, yet in depth paragraph. To me this is a great improvement and that I learned to correct sentence level errors, as I made many mistakes creating an essay. For example, I would write in my essay Today many teenagers play first person shooter video games such as the Call of Duty franchise. Now I learned that a comma goes after Today, because it is an introductory phrase. Members of the English Department, I hope that you enjoyed my essay. Sincerely yours: Mark Bacsal