Casey Shoop

The last reviewer is clearly someone who does not appreciate the class itself. For the most part, Casey Shoop is decent,borderline great. While he may give vague instructions, he does recognize that he is being vague and welcomes questions from students. Personally, I ENJOYED the fact that we had to read books for his class in addition to the articles. College classes are meant for students to learn, and while this class did not improve my writing skills, I still learned about the complexities of contemporary issues. Honestly, if you don't like University Writing, then you clearly will not like the professor. Personally, I thought this core class was interesting, not because of its applicability in writing future papers, but because of the progressions in addition to in depth discussions about the articles. Casey himself is extremely nice and is very lenient on pushing back deadlines. While at the beginning of the term, I was unsure of whether I should respect a grad student as my professor, I quickly began to appreciate his discussions more and more. Grading = fair, if you work hard (and hard does not mean an excessive amount of hours but rather attempting to apply his comments and mix some new creative ideas), you will do well. This isn't a joke class... don't think of it as one, otherwise its true you won't like the class or Casey.

SWITCH OUT OF THIS CLASS IMMEDIATELY. In my time in this class, I've seen Casey make 3 people cry because of his ridiculous workload and unreasonable marking. He makes you feel stupid and demoralized, and is generally just a bad teacher. On top of that, where other people could just get their readings on courseworks, we had to go out and BUY the frickin books on our free time. They were expensive too. If you can, do yourself a favor and get into another section as fast as you can.

Casey is not a bad teacher, he just happens to be an english PhD. And English PhDs are as uptight as they come about critical writing. I would not say that the class is useful at all-- I love the readings we did, and I still quote some of them in conversation. However, the structure and the stiffness of critical writing really turned me off to essay writing. I think that if I had been given a bit more freedom in the subject/aproach to writing, I would have liked this class. If you can, try to find an MFA student who teaches this class, they seem to be generally much more open to new styles of writing and less uptight about rules.

Casey's a cool guy. He's definitely smart, knows his stuff, interested in stimulating class discussion. He's pretty nice about pushing back deadlines on papers if there's a general class consensus on how much work they have coming up, and is really good about meeting up with you outside of class to go over any questions.

4 progressions (papers) that make up the bulk of your grade, participation is important! and a few writing exercises in between.

Ridiculous. Casey not only assigns a crapload of work, but marks hard too. Have fun if you intend on staying in his class.

The usual number of papers expected in UWriting, no midterm or final, allowed one rewrite. Fair grader - if you work hard, you should be able to pull off an A-.