The Blog: Musings of a Middle-Aged Student

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.

This is why I went back to school. The beginning workshop in ENG-329 was good, and I expected this course to build on it; I wasn't disappointed.

Finally. I'd been looking forward to this class for over a year and it did not disappoint. I enrolled at Southern New Hampshire University to become a better writer. To my mind, everything so far either built up to this or was merely a delay. ENG-226 and ENG-340 had some great writing opportunities, but ENG-329 was the first class to focus exclusively on writing and peer workshops.