Dear whomever it may concern:

By now you should know this is a course that requires you to take both speech and this specific English course. This course will focus very heavily on Brooklyn itself and almost every project you do for both classes are going to be on Brooklyn. The best advice I can offer you is actually walk around the area when you get that assignment. Walk around and find something you are actually interested in. This will help you so much because you can use that one place that you picked out for every piece of work you do for the semester in both classes. It will become twice as much work if you pick a place last minute and a few projects in, you decide you don’t want to do that specific place anymore. It’ll be a waste of research because you will have to do a final paper and a very important speech regarding that topic. Besides picking out a place early, the next best advice is to read the stories that Professor Rosen gives you. There is alot of in class discussion regarding these stories and if you don’t read them, you will have nothing to contribute to the discussions. There are quizzes and hand outs to do for these stories, so just read it. Some stories are pretty tedious but they’re not very long. The stories are usually stories about places in Brooklyn, the course is heavily revolved around Brooklyn hence the course being named “Being in Brooklyn.” You also need to learn how to write summaries. In this class, you literally write a summary for everything. You will be writing summaries for each story you read and you will even have to write a summary for the things you did in class that day. The final for English class is also a summary based essay and a thesis driven essay. With all of this said, Professor Rosen is one of the best professors you can get for this course and I wish you all the best of luck.