Most students get better at writing. The writing helped me to learn the content because just sitting in class and discussing it is helpful, but when you actually write it down and understand it, that's really when you learn and remember it . . . The primary objective of the course is to learn how to read, talk about, and write on poetry. Students survey the history of English lyric poetry from the Middle English through modern periods and discuss in-depth the variety and range of the poetry. They decide on the content of their letters, though the discussion must be analytical and relevant to the assigned poems.
Students write their letters on poems and readings assigned by the instructor.
He recommends that students write something they find personally appealing. In the beginning letter writing was a chore, but I began to realize how much it was helping me to be more objective. The letters are graded on quantity and quality. The qualitative portion of the grade is determined by the analytical discussion in each letter. The instructor grades all the letters, then computes the qualitative grade by averaging the grades on each student's five best letters.