My name is Brianna and I am a junior pursuing an undergrad degree in creative writing from Salisbury University. In my first two years at Salisbury I was majoring in Chemistry with the hopes to go to pharmacy school, but I wasn’t excelling in the classes and felt defeated and unsure of my future. After doing some research and talking with several professors, I made the decision to switch to English. Since then, my grades have improved immensely, I’ve found a topic for my Honors Thesis, and my overall happiness has improved.

Outside of classes I spend my time writing, working at the University Writing Center as a consultant, and as a member of the cheerleading team on campus. We cheer for all football games, men’s and women’s basketball games, and on-campus events. On top of that, we practice 3-4 times a week for our national competition that happens in April of every year. I’ve found that staying busy helps me to stay on top of my school work, so I enjoy having a full schedule.

As a writer, I don’t have much experience that goes past using pen and paper, or basic writing programs such as Microsoft Word. When it comes to multimodal writing, the closest thing I can think of is creating PowerPoint presentations for various classes. Majority of the time, the presentation slides utilize standard text, pictures, clip art, transition animations, and sounds. I don’t have experience creating audio files or videos, but I hope to learn through practice and the course of the semester.

The following is a list of goals I have set for myself in this class:

• Become comfortable with WordPress so that I can create a personal blog after the completion of this course
• Learn to create and upload audio files
• Become more familiar with the literature on multimodal and digital writing
• Use methods I learn in class in my current and future jobs
• Learn to recognize rhetoric in online texts

“The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.”

John Dufresne