eportfolio

About Me
      Hi my name is Stephanie and I’m currently a freshman here. I am from Berwyn, IL which is only about an hour and half away from here which is not too bad. I come from a family of five my mom and dad Mitzy and Sergio Cardenas. I have two brothers named Sergio and Gabriel I am the youngest of the 3. I like to take my education seriously I feel that Its important and you can never learn too much as long as you pace yourself. Growing up my parents always told me to "get good grades" "make sure you do your best" "always aim high". Throughout high school I would feel pressured and stressed to always not aim any lower than a "B" because I didn't want to disappoint my parents. Im grateful for them always pushing me to do my best because it got me into the school I wanted to come too. School has always been something I liked doing because I'll get bored easily so going to school helped me a lot to keep me busy. Ever since I was little writing has always been something important to me. I would always carry a diary with me and either stuff a napkin inside or write what it was about. Writing has always been a good way for me to express myself and just write what I’m feeling. Growing up in a house where I couldn’t really express how I felt I would be writing helped. Throughout English 103 I learned a lot about rhetoric and how to use it. Thanks to the examples that were shown in class and the activities we did as a class. We worked on our micro theme, personal essays and lastly our exploratory essays. Although that was not all we did we also wrote in our blog. The blog helped a lot because I learned how to put my thoughts into actual words. I’m going to be reflecting on my blogs, writing the micro theme and our in-class activities. We did a lot of work with our micro themes and it the end I feel that my micro theme was good because of all the back and forth we did with it and all the editing we did.
My Writing
      In class we did something different than what I’m use too. We got to make a blog which was a fun way to put our thoughts about class or just in general about life. I like how Kyburz let us write about what we felt like writing about instead of limiting us to just about English. This blog helped me express myself even when I was stress. Although some post were related to English like our reflection about our personal essay we still had some space where we can do our own thing. Writing blogs helped me write in more detail so when it came to be writing our personal essay it wasn’t that hard.
During our personal essays we did an activity where we just listen to different scenarios like imagine what it was like? what did you see?, what did you smell?, who was there? , did you hear anything? This activity helped me think about what was going on and give like a closer look into detail. It was hard for me to write my personal essay because it was so personal but I like how it came out I still wish I added more detail and got to use more pages maybe but overall I’m pretty proud of it.  I liked working on the personal essay though it challenged me to use new words and a different style. I though that writing about something so personal would have been hard for me putting my memories on paper and just talking about something thats still fresh to me in a way.  My personal essay is about my friend Jasmin who is like a sister to me and how she affected my life in the best way possible. She is just such a good human being and I don't know what I would do without her. (Even though that sounds super cheesy)
     What I learned

In this class I learned a lot about rhetoric writing which is like persuading people which is the definition I use when people ask me. In the beginning we got to learn more about our professor and she made us feel comfortable our first project we focused a lot on our microtheme essay which was hard cause I wanted to go in to more detail but it could only be 3 paragraphs so it wouldn’t have worked out. The micro theme was nice cause we didn’t have to go into detail but with the exploratory essay we did which was also cool because we got to do research and look into something that was interesting to me. My essay was about what its like for a child to experience a parent arguing and how it affects their mentality. It was a long long essay but in the end I finally finished it. This was probably the hardest just because of all the research but in the end I enjoyed doing it. During the exploratory essay I learned a lot about writing with sources and working with MLA format. It was new because in high school we just had to put the link but on this one we had to do that with the author and give a little description about each source. Adding sources wasn't something I was use too but now I learned to always cite and use the source so we can give credit to the author. This was also new to me because we had to use an academic journal which was different, I never even heard of an academic journal before, but I liked seeing peoples research and how they thought about the subject.
     In the end I really enjoyed this class because I liked how our professor made us feel comfortable in class like we would towards the end in of class get into a circle and talk about what we’re writing about and she always wanted to know how we are doing or if we were stuck on a specific part she would help us. I learned how to express myself more in this class. This helped because during these we would also do like peer review where we would get into a group of like 3-4 and get advice and like an audience there to like to help you through it.  It was nice to get advice about what needed to be fixed and like stuff to add.