First impressions

My name is Daniel Splane and welcome to my website! Click here to learn more about me during my "Me in 6 Words" presentation! I love playing video games, listening to music, and my favorite sport is football. I'm also obsessed with chicken wings.

I have a love-hate relationship with writing, because I hate having to sit down and read, but I love taking the time to form my own essays. My last writing class was my reading and comprehension class in high school, which was fairly easy. I tend to be good at analyzing articles and short texts, yet when it comes to novels it is very difficult for me to form an opinion on them. Despite this, I have always felt that writing was one of my best skills. However, as a reader, I have always felt that reading was one of my worst skills. I am somewhat comfortable reading and understanding complicated written texts, and I definitely do not consider myself a regular reader. A few examples of the stuff I find myself reading from time to time are sports news and scientific articles. Where I find myself having the most problems with reading is staying focused over a period of time. I often get distracted and fail to stay focused while reading. Back in high school, I would always be the last person to finish reading, and actually had to seek academic accommodations because of this. I ended up always being granted extra time, and these accommodations made me feel like I was finally at a fair chance of succeeding in an English class. In terms of writing articles, I find myself very good at using evidence to support my claim. Not only this, but I also find it easy to support my claim using the given evidence.

I am pretty shocked at my Language and Grammar score because I got a 58/100. I typically consider my language and grammar skills to be up to standard, and did not find the quiz to be difficult. However, my score does not reflect this.

This is a very accurate depiction of the way I reacted when I saw my results. Although I had an easy time determining which phrases were run-on sentences, I seemed to have difficulty while analyzing the sentences involving semicolons.

My biggest takeaway from the syllabus was that everything will be graded based on the grade contract. Although this seems difficult at first, the grade contract makes things clear and concise as to what is expected of the student in order to receive full credit for the assignment. To familiarize myself with the grade contract, I made sure to memorize the weights of all the things that will be entered into the grade book. For example, I know that 40% of the grade will be the Genre Analysis Essay, and 60% will be the Imitation Project Multimodal Memoir Essay. In terms of the objectives of this course, I found them to be nothing too unique. I know I will be writing heavily for this course, and that I will also be expected to dedicate a decent amount of time during the week to this class. Knowing this, I am very excited to see how I am capable of balancing the workload of this class.