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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Creative Writing: The Craft of Plot by Wesleyan University

4.7
stars
4,765 ratings

About the Course

In this course aspiring writers will be introduced to perhaps the most elemental and often the most challenging element of story: plot. We will learn what keeps it moving, how it manipulates our feelings, expectations, and desires. We will examine the choices storytellers make to snag our imaginations, drag them into a fictional world, and keep them there. We will learn how to outline and structure a plot, discuss narrative arc, pacing and reversals and reveal the inevitable surprise: connecting the beginning, middle and end....

Top reviews

HV

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Course is great, very clear and focused tips to improve one's writing. The peer-review is not that good and there is no instructor's evaluation and feedback. I understand that would be a lot of work.

D

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I have always been an avid reader. I took this class to familiarize myself with the techniques behind plot development. I would highly recommend this course, and the creative writing specialization.

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1326 - 1350 of 1,607 Reviews for Creative Writing: The Craft of Plot

By Matt T

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Nov 8, 2021

Very good lectures. I learned a lot. I enjoyed the assignments. The feedback I got from my peers was pretty minimal, and truthfully, most of the writing I reviewed was awful, so the feedback wouldn't have been relevant. I wish I could ask certain people to grade my work. People whose writing I have seen and appreciated.

By Monika C B

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Feb 22, 2016

This is a very good course, but I would have expected transcripts of the talks as well. I have done a few coursera courses and the supplementary materials here are minimal. Also, in the week 4, it is confusing to have the video transcript in the assigment section - very unclear whether that's a part of the assigment or not.

By Dee C

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Mar 27, 2022

I learned quite a bit. I do have a masters in creative writing, but I love taking different craft courses to refine my writing and become the best writer I can be. The assignments made me write outside my comfort zone and thing differently. I really enjoyed this part of the course. I look forward to the rest of them.

By Xin

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Mar 16, 2023

Good material, very helpful and encouraging. However, the peer review gets worse after week2.People begs for a passing grade, or leaves hateful review, or not answering the designed questions. Only thing that i don't like about this course. Will come back for other ones, maybe ppl will be nicer without so much heat.

By Sarah H

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Nov 30, 2020

The videos were excellent.

I would have liked to learn about a successful novel that deviates from the ABDCE structure. I can see that as beginners, we are best off keeping to the classic structure, but it would be interesting to have an example of a great novel that illustrates a variation on the classic structure.

By Julie S

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Jan 10, 2020

Such a delightful course. My only regret is that I wish teachers reviewed your work for the $49 monthly subscription. At least one teacher reviewing the work would make this a top notch effort to educate those that cannot afford the ever rising costs of top notch (or even mediocre) post-high school education.

By Nicole B

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Jan 30, 2017

The device of giving feedback has to simplistic, given the scope of the audience, but it's difficult to get any real value from it as far as future revisions. There should be a free write section that's required for someone to respond to the story organically as well as the specific, "Did the writer do this?"

By Arvind N V

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May 23, 2016

I learnt invaluable things in this course. I never knew of the Freytag's pyramid or the 21 point act structure etc and little by little, after doing the exercises, I feel I have learnt to edit my manuscript well enough. That has been my achievement as a learner of this course. Thanks a lot for the course. :)

By Acacia C

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Apr 6, 2022

I enjoyed the course, it had valuable content and a good amount of assignments to put what I learned to use. I do think a little feedback from the professor on maybe the last assignment would be beneficial. Sometimes peer reviews are the bare minimum feedback (ex. yes or no answers to the feedback prompts).

By Sijmen V

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Jan 14, 2021

The background and theoretical information was really usefull. Also the interviews with the writing professors offered a lot. The assignments however lacked true depth. Peer reviewing the work of others proved to be hard. 50% of the works I reviewed were unreadable because of the level of english presented.

By Samala K

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Sep 30, 2017

As the first class that I've done on Coursera, I really enjoyed the online videos and assignments. The only issue is that I would've like to have had a real professor read my work. Though I see the value (and logistical ease) of peer reviewers I didn't get credit sometimes and I didn't think it was fair.

By Pam N

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Jun 8, 2017

The course has very focused elements of structure and helps the student to learn how to use different elements to understand and evaluate her own story structure. For me, this made it much easier to understand some reasons why a story might not work or how it could be edited to good effect. I enjoyed it.

By Silvana L K

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Oct 1, 2022

I enjoyed doing this course, the content was really useful but I wish we had more examples in each of the modules.

I would also like to ask to the course instructors the possibility to add tags for the sensitive content so we can know and decide in advance whether to read it or not.

Thanks for the course

By Sanika

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Apr 29, 2019

A great well detailed course with interesting assignments. It really got me writing, gave me constructive feedback and confidence in my writing style. The technicalities involved in creative writing were nicely explained in a fun way. Heartfelt thanks to the instructor and all the guest authors.

By Ajay C

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Nov 13, 2017

The course was great, learned a lot and enjoyed the assignments.

From the reviews it seemed that some of my peers understood certain terms differently. I am pretty certain the way I understood things were correct and also think my peers feel the same way. That's the only drawback I experienced.

By ANGEL Y S V

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Jul 28, 2020

Sé que no debería ser así y las personas que tomamos este curso ya estamos grandes, pero muchos no hacen las correcciones y observaciones pertinentes: simplemente dicen cosas como "Sí", "Bien", "¿Por qué no?" y nos dejan sin una retroalimentación correcta. Dejando eso de lado, excelente curso.

By LaShaunda C

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May 13, 2019

It filled in a few of the blanks that I felt I was missing. I was able to collect resourceful notes to help throughout writing my first epic urban fantasy fiction novel book series and I recommend this course to anyone that wants to learn just a bit more about Plotting in Creative Writing.

By Amanda L P

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Aug 26, 2020

I learned quite a bit, as this is my first creative writing course. I was able to get some hands on practice and peer feedback...4 only though because i found some of the peer reviews to be lacking (one word, no feedback) the course should have some sort of panel to rate these as well

By Catherine S

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Aug 24, 2023

Sad to see that the peer reviews aren't always well done. People don't read, write any comment, and it makes me feel like this program isn't very serious. I'm giving it another chance, but I don't think I'll continue (A private creative class seems more useful for my wants and needs)

By Aly A

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Oct 22, 2022

A enjoyable course with easy to follow videos and the interviewers were knowledgable to learn from.

One critique would be the reviews by others. Some simply acknowledged reading the story without providing any feedback, which is unfortuante. Can there not be any vetting process?

By Shreshta B S

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Jun 21, 2020

It's good, one understands how should a story start and progress to make a reader indulge and enjoy the reading. The structures and advices drastically improves one's writing abilities, in fact your change in the way you write can be noticed between your first and last assignment.

By Miguel B

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Jul 6, 2017

Excellent content and course design. Mr Skyhorse material and his personal touch make it informative and throughly enjoying to have this very first incursion in the writing world.

The several technical issues with the app subtract a star from the otherwise excellent course

By Anna B E

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Oct 11, 2020

I found the course interesting. Half of the work is reviewing other students writings but not everyone is taking this part seriously. I only had 1 review done correctly, the other 11 where useless with short answers to the questions as "yes", "no", ".", "good", "like".

By Anwesha N

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Aug 5, 2020

The course instruction was superb. Assignments really helped us push our limits. The only complain I have is the discussion forum. It hardly offered any good discussion. All were about assignment reviews. The Week 4 assignment reviews+submissions were the best ones.

By Abhishek T

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Jul 17, 2018

Gives an idea of structure.

Assignments provide challenging and restrictive setups that compel creative forces to find their rhythm in all scenarios.

Feedback is really morale boosting as well as useful critique, some angles come up that the author never looked into.