ENGL 2599

Professor Casteen was the first professor to make me actually enjoy literature! I'm not an English major, and the only other English courses I've taken are honors/AP/ENWR throughout high school and my first semester at UVA. I chose to fulfill my second ENWR requirement with this course and am so happy that I did. (This is coming from someone who's always aced English classes via the bare minimum for an A, but has viscerally hated them my entire life.)

First off, Casteen genuinely cares about how you're doing in his course, and makes helpful suggestions on how to improve your writing. He's easy to approach/set up office hours with, clarifies his expectations for his assignments, responds to his emails in a timely manner, and somehow manages to make every single class interesting. His lectures were never boring. To be honest, his classes weren't really lectures at all. Every class is more of a discussion regarding the topics we read about. The readings were never too long, maybe 10-15 pages at most. If I remember correctly, you're only graded for your writing and participation. It seems intimidating, but if you put in the work and communicate with him, you will be rewarded. Getting an A in his class requires effort, but it's not impossible. He's a fair instructor, so I ended with an A-.

Grading: Most of the class was graded on your writing (60%), and there were only 6 or 7 writing assignments. 20% comes from participation in discussion, and the final 20% comes from the final writing assignment. He doesn't accept late work (immediate 0%/F), unless you communicate that to him in advance.

TDLR: Great professor, I put the work into his class because 1) I felt like he deserved my best work considering how much he cares about his students/how well he teaches 2) I wanted to do well and improve in this class despite having other difficult classes that required more of my attention 3) I wanted a good grade. Your essays can't be like the "essay sandwich" or whatever you were taught in middle school. Aka, don't limit your essays to 5 paragraph, keep expanding your ideas to as many paragraphs as you need to get your point across clearly. It will be a rough start, so you should communicate with him as much as possible (office hours/emails). Make sure to ask him where you made mistakes so you don't repeat them. Send him an email about wanting to talk after class about your work, and he'll make the time for it. His classes are never boring, and it's worth your time. I'm not an English major (I'm a biology major) and I can say this is the best class I've taken at UVA.

Tips: I annotated all the readings, which helped tremendously with the writing assignments. Also, there's a diagnostic writing assignment (it's the first writing assignment he gives you), and you should write as much as you can on it. If I remember correctly, he lets you write about whatever you want. So, make sure you give him more content to critique so that when the graded stuff comes around, you're more prepared and your grade doesn't take as much of a hit.

Ironically, I'm writing this a year after taking it as a late night afterthought. So no, this review is not grammatically correct or phrased perfectly. Professor Casteen, if you're seeing this, it's just "A Collection of Thoughts" :)