I am grateful to this course. It has helped me a lot!

Great course. The writing exercises were excellent.

This was a great first dive into memoir writing!

A frend and I spent entry a firt, Beau , age41

I enjoyed this course. It was very interesting.

Great course with engaging instruction.

Good tips, well explained.

Excellent presenter

I liked the videos and found them worthwhile. I hope to watch them again.

The writing assignments were interesting in principle--the concepts animating the assignments were provocative--but it was hard to do them and also come up with a few hundred words of interesting prose.

They were tricky and schematic, and felt more like puzzles than like writing prompts. In particular, the selfie exercise and the "interview" exercise were confusing. . It was hard to understand why we were asked to write about a selfie and also about a picture taken by someone else--it seemed like an arbitrary juxtaposition.

As for the two interviews, it wasn't clear whether the point of the exercise was to describe a past event or to point out inconsistencies in the memories of others. The writers I evaluated also had problems with this exercise--they interviewed their kids and got different perspectives on an event and then wrote about that, not about the event itself. Their pieces were fun to read, but were only tangentially related to the actual assignment.

I think it would more more useful/stimulating to do an exercise in which we write up an event that we participated in, show it to another participant, and then and add a paragraph about how that person's memories diverged from ours, and about what else we remembered after having this conversation..

Or simply to write about a past event after doing several interviews, without devoting a lot of attention to who remembered what and why.

In any case, I don't think that the grading rubrics are helpful in getting good feedback on our writing--they are more about whether we conformed to the assignment than about how interesting/well-written/artfully-constructed the pieces are. ( I got no feedback at all on my last piece--just a bunch of "OK's".). I would rather have people asked about whether they were engaged or touched by my memoir, and what in it seems to be worth exploring more fully.

I appreciate the fact that the course was "free" (except for the monthly Coursera fee). The course is a gentle way to explore memoir and personal essay writing while still maintaining a real-life schedule. The lectures were in doable segments of a few minutes at a time. Greg Pardlo is a chill personality and it was nice to hear some of his personal work in connection to the course. Like most things, you get what you put in. If people don't do the exercises with care and time, there won't be much benefit.

Some lessons and exercises were better than others. I loved Context and Memory from the first week. The selfie assignment from the third week seemed to confuse a lot of people, and seemed like an awkward modern spin on a more traditional writing exercise. The final exercise of interviewing 2 people can be an effective way of exploring different perspectives of the same event, but I think many students (including myself) weren't prepared to interview 2 people. So seems like many didn't truly do the assignment to the point where it was supposed to help. The topics if the course kind of jump around. Not sure if it would be more beneficial to explore fewer techniques more in depth, or keep the variety.

Greg, I have to admit I found Course 1 of the Specialization to be harder to understand than the other three courses. I am still somewhat confused about the Frame concept and Extradiagetic frames for example.Family interviews are not really practical for me because all the people I need are dead. Even the Selfie assignment was not really clear for me especially after reviewing some of the peer submissions.

Despite the above I think a careful review of the content of Course 1 will likely prove to be very useful and I need all the help I can get, that's for sure. I'm trying to write my first book so this entire Specialization has been a great.help.

I thought professor Greg was excellent. I learned a lot and found the material very useful. He made me consider elements of memoir writing that were totally new to me.

My only complaint was that there was a week where nobody gave feedback to my submission. And the final assignment I felt needed more time to complete because we had to engage two outside participants and that's difficult to coordinate and also then write in just one week. So I turned that assignment in late and did not get feedback on that one either. That last one is understandable but the previous one wasn't.

I thought the first few weeks were interesting and the assignments thoughtfully constructed. The second two weeks had assignments that were either less clearly explained (especially week 3, but I thought that was the weakest week in general) or potentially challenging to complete for reasons other than academic difficulty. This course could use more polish and review but I did not feel as if my time was ill-spent.

Excellent course. It made me think, sometimes a little too hard. I had trouble with The diegesis and the extradiegetic frame concepts but as they continue to become clearer, I can see how useful the concepts are in memoir / personal narrative. I wish the course made them clearer than it does.as they are really helpful. Thank you!

Enjoyed the course and the writing prompts. The prompts helped me to focus on my audience, which is one of the skills I hoped to improve. My only complaint relates to feedback from peers, which was often slow. Otherwise, I enjoyed and learned a great deal in the course.

Fran L.

I liked the course, but I wish the videos went into a little more depth on HOW to achieve certain writing styles. The instructor talks about the different tools used when writing memoirs, but I wish he explained how exactly to use those tools a little better.

Eye opening from a technical writing viewpoint but slightly frustrating practically as it took me longer to finish than I wanted due to relying on others to review my work. Nevertheless, this course has some vital information for writers. Recommended.

The last two assignments were difficult for me, but I learned important lessons which should help me accomplish my goals. I didn't understand assignment # 3 until I reviewed others assignments. I recommend this course if you want to learn to write.

The course covered key elements of memoir and I learned a lot. The lectures were very good and relevant. I loved Greg's presentation style. I found following the instructions for the assignments difficult at times.

I really enjoyed this course. It's frustrating if you aren't on the same schedule as several others though, making it difficult to review others' work and have them review yours.

One of the projects was difficult for older people with no living parents who could describe a childhood memory. It came off as ageist to some.

I enjoyed this course and found it very valuable. I thought some of the assignments were confusing and could be clarified.

The last assignment could use a few examples. I’ve passed but I don’t know if I really met the rubric.

Every week I got an interesting assignment and developed the writing skills. Thank you!

Lots of insightful tips and thought provoking ideas for my memoir.