Cover Letter

28/11/12

Dear Reader:

As an international student, it is hard for me to studying in America especially the writing part. In my first semester at CSUN, I wrote three essays in ENGL 113 A class with my professor’s help. I want to talk about two of them—Learning from Reading and The Use of Rhetorical Strategies in iPhone 5 Trailer—which really mean a lot to me.

The first one contains my experience of studying since I was a little kid. I am the only child in my family so I was so spoiled by my parents when I was young. Things have changed after I got my first book. I have read hundreds of stories and fables in that book and learned many virtues. It was helpful for me to develop the good characters such as responsibility, courage and faith, etc. I also learned the definition of growing up by reading: knowing my goal of future and being responsible for myself. So I set up my goal to study abroad and began to work on English. It is not easy to achieve my target. I have met billions of difficulties on the path of learning English but I never give up. I told myself over and over that faith could move mountains to encourage myself. Finally and fortunately, I made it. I am now a student at CSUN and I can catch up with the local students in my class even it is hard for me. Nevertheless, I am still on the way of learning English and it would never ends.

The second essay is about an advertisement of the iPhone 5. I have changed my major to marketing when I arrived at America because American is the best at marketing, especially the Apple Company. The heart of marketing is communication and I have learned the rhetorical strategies—logos, pathos and ethos—in the class. Analysis the trailer of iPhone 5 helped me understood the use of those rhetorical strategies, so I put this paper in my portfolio.

Honestly, I made many mistakes in both of the essays. After had workshop with my classmates and edited my essay with professor’s help, I corrected some of mistakes in my essays and made revisions. I changed the order of some paragraphs because they are not in the right place. Writing is probably the hardest part in learning English. Every time I tried to write something I have to translate the topic in Chinese—my first language—then think of the topic and find evidences to support my opinion in Chinese before translate my thoughts in English and typed them in my laptop. I learned the skills and rules of write a good essay from the course of this semester and used them in my essays. I can feel the significant improvements of my writing skill via my essays. Even though my writing is not good enough to get a grade of A, but now I can easily express my feelings or describe my experiences in English. Most of the time I can show my idea clearly in Chinese but I just cannot express myself in English. It was hard for me to give expressions in the foreign language. In my essays, arguments and thesis cannot be conveyed correctly sometimes, but the entire thesis have strong supportive evidences.

I worked very hard on all the essays and I did do my best though to get my idea across and make them satisfied. However, I know my essays are still not perfect. All I need to do to develop my writing skill is to practice more and read more in English. I will absolutely do that continuously in the future. Thank you for taking your time on read this letter and my essays.

Sincerely,

Rachel Yiyi Ge

Learn from Reading

Rachel Yiyi Ge

Kitty Nard

English 113 A

14 November 2012

Learn from Reading

There is a proverb: “One is never too old to learn”. Learning is a thing that people can never stop for the whole life. It makes people knowledgeable, brilliant and confident. Reading is one of the easiest methods to earn knowledge. Reading requires courage, self-discipline, creativity, and persistence to me. I was born in a literary family so reading became a habit for me since I was very young. Personally, reading helps me a lot in my life.

Reading enhanced my personality. I am the only child of my family so my parents spoiled me. I used to be selfish: never share food or toys with other kids, take things from my grandpa without saying thanks, being rude to my parents when I was not satisfied. Things changed when I got my first book from my mom on my 6- year-old birthday—“The Book of Virtues”, wrote by William J. Bennett. I have read thousand of books in my childhood, this is not my favorite one but this is the one that influence me the most. Everyone recognizes these traits as essentials of good character: Responsibility, Courage, Compassion, Honesty, Friendship, Persistence and Faith. This book has contained hundreds of stories to instructing and inspiring anthology that will help me understand and develop those characters. It also provides examples of good and bad, right and wrong so that I develop such traits in great works of literature and exemplary stories from history. It is my initiatory book, which I could get the sources of the ideals by which I wish to live my life. 

Reading letting me knows about myself and help me figured out what kind of life I want to create. After I entered high school, I felt like I could do everything like an adult but actually I was not mature enough to be responsible for myself. Then I started to feel confused about the definition of grow up. Meanwhile, I have read a poem named Growing Up, which wrote by Cheng Gu, a famous Chinese poet in the 70s. In the poem, he stated that the mark of growing up is neither entering high school nor writing an essay in foreign language. The most remarkable milestone of growing up knows your goal of your future. This really means a lot to me in my whole life. From his poem, I noticed that life is short and limited, no one can make his or her life longer, but can make his or her life wider by experience more different cultures. I set up a goal of study abroad when I was 16. I was not born in a rich family so it is not easy for my parents to support me to study abroad. But, if I finished my college in 3 years, I can get a job in my mom’s company easily. It seems that I can get a stabile job and live comfortably in the future. But this is NOT what I want. I did many researches about study abroad and start to improve my English. Firstly, I attended to a IELTS training school. I have to provide my IELTS score to apply for entering CSUN and it requires a limitation of 5.5 out of 9 for international students to be admitted without engaged the international English program (IEP). To achieve my goal, I wrote myself a diary as a reminder. Every time when I felt tired for catching on my dream, I read that diary again and again and then put myself back to study. I took my exam on 19^th February 2012. It was just after the Chinese New Year. All my families were gathering together to celebrate the big festival at our hometown: Anqing. But I did not join them; I prefer to go back to Beijing to study alone at school. I woke up at 7 o’clock in the morning and stay at the library for the whole day until it closed at 9 o’clock in the night everyday. I did thousands of exercises and read a lot of related books to get fully prepared. After I took the exam, I feel released. I was fill of confidents because I worked very hard on preparing the exam. The result came out at 29^th February 2012 and I was very happy:  I got 6 out of 9. I sent my transcript and all the files to the admission and record office of CSUN and received my offer.

Reading also helps me on learning English especially on my writing skills. English became the biggest challenge to me after I made the decision of studying abroad. As the matter in fact, writing is the most difficult part for all international students not only for me. I can write very well in my native language—because I have read thousands of books in Chinese and I can easily find arguments and evidences to support my opinion.  But it is really hard for me to write in English. In order to enhance my writing skill, I began to read English articles since I recognize my weakness in writing. I have to introduce about one of the hardest writing experiences during my college: it is the first English essay I had written when I was a freshman. It was an investment project and I have sent thousands of emails to gathering useful data and it took me almost 3 moths to finish the project. There are difficulties everywhere: I had to translate all my thoughts and knowledge into English and I had collected a lot of data but I didn’t know how to start my essay and how to gather all the data together. To carry out the project, I have read a lot of economic magazines and newspapers and I even invented a writing process for myself. I made myself a list to organize the contents of my project. It was a hard time. But I got the highest score in my class due to my continuously hard working.

That was my narrative of how reading changes my life and how it helped during my study life. Reading really has a lot of advantages—Reading can make me smart and wise: I have learnt so many things from reading. And reading helps me a lot when I wrote: I can easily find arguments and evidences to support my opinion. Nevertheless, I am keep on reading more article and gain knowledge to make myself more wisdom and become a spiritual warrior. 

Proposal

Rachel Yiyi Ge

Kitty Nard

English 113 A

05 November 2012

Proposal  

I propose to write about my interest in reading and difficulties in writing. Before talking about the difficulties in writing, I want to introduce the advantages of reading.

 I am a big fan of reading since I was very little and I was benefited from reading. Reading requires courage, self-discipline, creativity, and persistence to me. Reading can make me smart and wise: I have learnt so many things from reading. And reading helps me a lot when I wrote: I can easily find arguments and evidences to support my opinion. I have read thousands of books so I can write very well in my native language, which is Chinese, but it is really hard for me to write in English.

From there, I would like to talk about the hard parts in my writing process. I want to talk about one of the hardest writing experience during my college: it is the first English essay I had written when I was a freshman. It was an investment project. I had collected a lot of data but I didn’t know how to start it and how to gather all the data together. Besides, I had to translate all my thoughts and knowledge into English. So I had to make myself a list to organized the contents of my project. After that I began to write about my experience of write an essay in English and show the audiences how I went through those problems.