I picked “Popular Culture” because I figured we’d get to talk about movies and TV and music. How hard could it be? I’ve been steeped in pop culture for 30 years.

Turns out, I was almost right.

This is ENG-340 taken to its logical end: a complete authorial presence and publishing plan. It sounds like a lot, and it can be, but there isn’t anything super difficult here.

If my college education was a movie, ENG-359 would be the climax, and LIT-450 (plus the next two courses) would be the last 15 minutes of the film that tries to wrap up the loose ends (except my ending was 16 weeks long, so it was more like The Return of the King that way).

Everything led to this course. Every reason I had for going back to school brought me to this point. Sure, there are three more classes after this—two of them relevant to my major—but when you want to learn to be a better writer, you yearn for the workshops.

My studies covered literary theories like Marxism, New Criticism, and Formalism way back in LIT-200, and LIT-300 is merely more of the same. Like I said about LIT-200, it’s a lot. Take heart, though, because any student who did well in that course should have no trouble here.

I’m the kind of person who listens to podcasts about language, like Word Matters from Merriam-Webster, so this class should have been right up my alley. And it was! Except when it wasn’t. Hold on, I’ll explain.