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

I very much enjoyed the guidance and video direction. However, I am not comfortable evaluating other writers, and I would like direct feedback from the instructor. Still, this exercise was much more valuable that the local writing conference I attended which was more trade show than collaborative experience. I will continue with this model for the rest of the program.

It's definitely a course that will give you a general idea and structure of several elements you include on your writing daily, but perhaps don't even notice. It's for sure helped me get a better grip on the base of plotting and organizing ideas. All in all, a fun, easy course to try if you're looking to better your writing and complement your technique with new methods!

I really enjoyed the taped lectures and thought the assignments paired nicely. I'd like if Coursera set up a interactive element to the online learning environment such as a live chat with the instructor once a week and perhaps a live forum area with a set meeting time for the students. I've taken other online classes that have had these and found them extremely useful.

The course is great, I've been meaning to learn how to write for ages and it's so easy with this course. Love the assignments and feel like it really pushes me to keep up the skills learned. The only thing I would wish for is comments from the organisers or even that we could see what was said about our texts as it's really hard to improve without proper feedback.

I just wish there was some review by the instructor(s) and hope that will happen with the capstone. While some of the peer reviewers were very helpful and gave constructive criticism, others answered the questions with one-word answers. Another said I had not followed the instructions although it was clear that I did as confirmed by the other two reviewers.

​Love this course. The lecturer has a different approach to creative writing. You'll really learn new techniques. However, peer graded assignments are not taken seriously. Some learners don't really read your work and spam unrelated feedback. Some pass mediocre work. They just want to "earn" the certificate the easy way. Hope Coursera filters them out.

I think it’s a great course as it has truly given me a lot of foundation knowledge and would recommend anyone to do it. My only downfall is that I do think the last two talks which are in Week 4 weren’t as substantially informative as the previous weeks, so maybe we could remove one and include another lecture there. Otherwise great stuff!

I think Skyhorse was very good. His instructions are clear. A little too heavy on Harry Potter references.

The theory on the 5 act helped frame the work. This class inspired me to take all 5 courses.

I wish is passion for writing would come thru a little stronger. It would also be nice to have more instructor feedback vs peer reviews.

The course is amazing! Brando Skyhorse explains everything perfectly! Our assignments are extremely interesting and challenging. I give 4 of 5 stars because I would've loved it if our assignments were reviewed by a professional writer as well. Some of the reviews I got were "yes" and "very good" which are not constructive criticism.

The learning material and exercises in this course are engaging, provoking, and definitely got me writing! I wish the peer review process was a bit less cumbersome (waiting for work to review before proceeding), but it also helped to cement the intended learning of lesson when having to deduce the implementation in peer's work.

I learned a few things that I will definitely be using. The course was easy to follow and entertaining. The knowledge won't turn you into a great writer overnight but it is a good foundation. The requirements of the assignments were at times unclear but the process of reviewing your peers teaches the learner a lot. Good course.

I'd rate any course as 4+, at the end of which I can learn something tangible. This course introduced me to basic structure of story telling. The assignment was fun and the explanation was simple enough.

The best part was that the author explained concepts using Harry Potter and not some arcane book that I might not have read.

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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. :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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