Daemen College

Daemen College's OWL has a split screen format that makes accessing different parts of the OWL quite easy. The handouts offered are confusing and difficult to read. Daemen offers links to 10 other university OWLs, which is helpful for students who need assistance and cannot get it from the Daemen OWL. Overall, Daemen College's OWL rates 2 hoots. 

Ease of Navigation

Non-Techie Perspective:

Daemen College's OWL uses a split screen format for its site. This allows the student to access different parts of the OWL easily. The OWL asks students to email the paper or portions of the paper to the writing center, and offers comprehensive instructions for the transmission of the email. This site also links to various dictionaries, thesauri and style sheets. These links are quite thorough. Additionally, Daemen College provides links to ten other university's OWLs. Providing these links allows the students to search out information at other OWLs. The easy-to-use split screen format and the extensive links to other helpful sites make up for the lack of colorful graphics. I give the Daemen College OWL 4 hoots.

 

Techie Perspective:

Rating: 2 Hoots

The frame layout used on this site did not work well with the standard size monitor I viewed it on. The navigational bar on the left side of the page would have been nice if sized differently. The layout wasted valuable space; the "Writing Space" and logo took up about one third of the screen which caused the reader to scroll down for information about the site, which wasn't very extensive. I really did not like that every link accessed from the navigational bar loaded into the main window. This made it confusing and difficult to read, especially since some of those files were not formatted to fit into that frame size.

I was not impressed with this site. It looked like it might have potential if someone would take the time to polish it up with better quality graphics that would add visual interest.

Feedback on Submitted Paper

Turnaround time: Not Applicable
Promised turnaround: Within 24 hours
Day submitted: November 7th and 21st
Day of response: No Response given
 

Format for submission: Must email paper to their address. Students can also send using Netscape's mail function or cut and paste with Eudora.

Difficulty level: Moderate

Amount of feedback received: No feedback was received from either submission.

Quality of feedback: Not Applicable

Staff qualifications: No info on this topic.

Additional features: Dictionaries, Style sheets

Overall Rating: 1 Hoot

Handouts

Unfortunately, the Daemen College Writing Space does not provide handouts on specific writing and editing problem areas. I sent an email message to owl@helman.daemen.edu, which is the address given for questions about writing content and grammar. I simply asked them if they had handouts for problem writing areas which do not appear on their OWL, and did not receive a response. This suggests that there is a lack of effort responding to student inquiries at the Daemen OWL. If I had actually needed the handouts during the writing process of a pending assignment, I would have been extremely disappointed. I would have regretted my decision to depend on this OWL for information, which they offered to provide.

On the main page, the Daemen OWL also invites users to provide feedback concerning missing information on any of their webpages. The phrase "please let us know" is underlined to indicate that it is a link to an email address. I clicked there, but received a warning message: "In order to send email via this link, a user email address must be specified." Since I was operating from a campus computer lab, no personal email address was available. Therefore, I had to copy the address from the warning message and open my personal email account to send the message. My second effort to contact the Daemen OWL was in vain; I received no response. The Daemen OWL provides ten links to other universities' writing labs, but it is not specified whether or not handouts are available. As a student seeking quick writing assistance, that I can print out and take with me, I wasted a lot of time trying to get it from the Daemen OWL. Therefore, I rate this OWL 2 Hoots.

Other Resources

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