Informal Writing #2 - Letter

Dear Dr. Schonberg

I feel that the writing that was done in my freshman seminar was very significant and prepared me well for second quarter. The class that I chose to take was called Celluloid Government: American Politics through Film. Being a film major in the Communications department, I initially chose this class because the film aspect of the class interested me. I am not very interested in politics; however I thought that maybe this class would help to raise that appeal a little bit more by the end of the quarter. I think it was fairly successful in a sense that I am more interested in the political world now than I was before enrolling in my seminar.
In this class, we would watch a political movie every Monday and discuss the films on Wednesdays. As we watched the films we were required to take notes about the given theme that we were prompted with before the film and email them to my professor afterwards. These notes would help us prepare ourselves to write papers and would also help us to engage more in discussions of the films. During discussions we would go very in depth about the plot, characters, and themes of the film and how it related to politics and what we were talking about in class. These discussions really helped to prepare for writing papers on the films and were a good way to clear up any questions or confusing parts of the films. We did not write papers every week; however we would write them every 2 to 3 weeks or so about the movies we had seen. Often times, two consecutive movies would have similar themes like good guys/bad guys, the significance of cinematography, corrupt cities or groups, and other topics of that nature. Most of the papers were compare and contrast papers linking politics into a certain topic like previously stated within 2 or 3 films. For example, one paper I wrote was comparing and contrasting the characteristics of the “villains” in Advise and Consent, 12 Angry Men, and The American President. I think that these papers prepared me well for analyzing films or readings for specific themes and being able to compare them to other writings or movies. Most of these papers were around 3-6 pages typed and double spaced and really forced you to analyze movies for similarities and themes rather than simply watching them for enjoyment. I did enjoy this class and the papers we wrote because analyzing movies is something that interests me, yet I was challenged by the political nature of most of the assignments because I am not very interested in politics, however that was somewhat changed by the time the class ended.
I feel that this course prepared me well for my second quarter of college writing, however it did lack some skills that were needed. My seminar focused mostly on comparisons rather than narratives or persuasive papers. Although my high school prepared me extremely well on almost all kinds of writing, my freshman seminar did not touch upon more than one type of writing. Overall, the writing in my seminar was very worthwhile, interesting, and prepared me well for my second quarter of college, however, I would like to branch out into more areas of writing which I think this class will do a lot of.

Sincerely,

James Tarras