The instructors were great. I learned a lot from them. Sadly, the reviews by other students were, in many cases, substandard. Some would give one-word answers while others just entered a period so the system would record a response. Since I am more interested in learning than in the certificate, I see no reason to pay for the course. I can get the same value by auditing the course. It would be most helpful if the responses were monitored.

Compared to other courses in the creative writing specialization, I felt that this one needs some improvement. The video lectures just didn't have enough meat to them. For example, in other courses in the specialization, there will be links to optional readings or videos, leading to a deeper understanding of the concepts. Some readings, for example, would be welcome to give example of great (or even not so great) characterization.

I did come away with some good books/stories for reading, but would have like them to be included in the course the way it is in the Setting and Description module. I found the videos did not always lead up to the assignment, and I think the assignments could have been more clearly laid out. I still came away learning, but it did not feel very structured. To be fair, character is a sort of amorphous subject to begin with.

The course discusses a lot of useful techniques and ideas involved in building deep characters and communicating them with the reader. However, I did find many parts of the course to be repetitive and too abstract to be of any practical use. The shop talks especially seem to be loosely focused on the week's material and the interviewees rarely have helpful responses to Ms Amy Bloom's questions.

Like a lot of other reviewers have said the utility of this class is limited by the wide range of skills of students in it. That means both the work you review and the reviews of your work will vary in quality quite a bit. The lectures themselves are a bit meandering but I think it's mostly very hard to something both broad and substantive about art.

If the week 4 was not there, i would have a 2 or even a 1 for this class.

Until week 4, there was very little connection between what we were watching and what we were asked to write assignments. And the assignments were also confusing and overly restrictive. There didnt seem to be any sense in why we were asked to write those.

It was good , but in comparison to the other courses it had problems.

There was way too less of clear strucutre to follow and it was too much of just talking, with different authors. I would have liked to have a more organized and better structured theoretical input.

Also some of the assignments I did not find usefull.

The peer reviewed assignments don't really strike me as peer reviewed if you are just begging in forums for someone to hit a button. The feedback so far has only a few times been valuable. I don't get the point of the system if reviews can be shopped in forum It negates some of the value of it all.

The lectures were informative, but the end-of-week assignments were VERY poorly explained, generally had little to do with the week's lectures, and to add insult to injury had grading criteria that did not correspond with the points that were laid out in the instructions.

The first assignment was a lot of fun but the other three were a little confusing, as evidenced by the ever-recurring questions on the forum. The videos were usually really interesting though. Amy has a very pleasant voice but seems to rely on her notes a little too much.

Not by far as good as the first module (Craft of Plot). This course seemed less planned and structured. The videos were mostly interviews that sort of touched upon the subjects but hardly ever got into detail. The assignments were often vague and harder to understand.

I found the assignment instructions to be quite confusing. Some of the questions asked for the peer-to-peer reviews were very unclear. I didn't feel the course, overall, offered the same level of content and knowledge that the Craft of Plot offered.

The instructor is phenomenal and so is her writing. However, the assignments (imo) are too difficult for beginning writers such as myself. Trying to write to such specific guidelines really slowed down my progress because I had such a hard time.

I think Judy Bloom is a brilliant writer. She is also an engaging instructor but I found it difficult at time to discern what the salient points or "take-aways" were from the lectures. I also found the assignment to be less than clear.

I've got the chance to practice writing and I've learned some interesting insights, but I think the instructor didn't put too much effort into this course. All there is to it are 'shop talks' and too little structure.

I felt like the teaching was fairly abstract, and I had a difficult time figuring out how I was supposed to apply certain lessons. Overall, I did pick up several helpful hints, so the course was worth it.

I found most of the assignments very confusing and difficult to complete. It is a real challenge and forces you to really think, think hard and hope for the best. If you take the course, good luck.

The course was very interesting and shed light on the specifics on character development. However, the questions in most peer-graded assignments were some times not suitable for the assignment.

The course material is great, but the grading usually doesn't result in me getting good feedback. Most students just write "good" without expanding on how I can improve.

The information provided is great, but there's so many "shop talks" aka interviews with other Coursera instructors that it misses out on so many possible true lessons.

Achei as atividades um pouco cansativas, e pouco intuitivas. Os vídeos mais longos e com momentos mais entediantes em relação ao primeiro modulo.

I enjoyed everything that I learned from the course. My only wish is that the course included teacher reviews in addition to the peer reviews.

I honestly didn't learn a lot more than in the first course of the specialization. Some of the assignments were a little off-putting to me.

the exercises were ok but the pointless videos of the lady talking with people were Absolutly useless and seemed an exercise in vanity

Most of the assignments had nothing to do with the lectures. The assignments instructions weren't clear sometimes and very confusing.