Writing is really, really hard. One of the hardest things that you will ever learn to do is to discipline your language and thinking to make it coherent and organized, in a style that other people can easily understand. It is, however, possibly the most important skill we teach in the humanities, and the one that employers ask for again and again, regardless of the profession: companies are in desperate need of engineers, doctors, chemists, accountants, adverstising directors, and more who are capable of expressing themselves clearly and convincingly with the written and spoken word.

Like all language skills, however, writing cannot be learned in a week or two, and there is not an even, constant progression in which every week you write better than the last—you wouldn't expect this if you were learning a musical instrument, either. It can be frustrating, but don't give up. The rewards arrive eventually (sometimes later, sometimes sooner), and one day, you'll have a clear argument in your head before you even sit down, and paragraphs will come out, each of which reflects a single, clear idea. You'll still need to work on your writing, but it will be other, marger issues that preoccupy you.

There are tons of resources for undergraduate writing on campus, broadly organized under the Center for Writing Studies. You will probably be interested in the Writers Workshop, which holds regular hours at the Undergraduate Library and several other locations around campus.

I also have my own set of pages here. The cultural references get dated over time, but several students have found them helpful over the years.

One note on writing about films that this class will underscore. When you cite a book, you provide a page number to help your professor locate the citation and see it in context and check it for accuracy. Students often assume they should similarly give the time stamp for a film scene ("at 1 hour, 12 minutes and 22 seconds, the protagonist turns to his love interest, and says..."). This is almost useless, however, since even today, many, many versions of every film are in circulation, and each kind of technology effectively plays back and encodes films at different speeds (DVD, BluRay, laserdisc, VCR, PAL or NTSC, etc). In the case of silent film, the idea that a time stamp even could have a theoretical meaning disappears. First of all, each and every copy of silent films has been cut, edited and modified differently — each surviving copy of Cabiria has a different run time, so saying 1:12:22 doesn't mean anything. Secondly, many silent films were originally hand-cranked, and even those that had regular turn speeds varied from device to device (and from day to day), so not only is each copy different — each individual screening takes place in a unique time, just like the performance of a play or a piece of music. As a result, when we discuss a film scene, we describe it enough to allow a reader to locate the scene in their copy ("when the hero first confronts the evil robots in Ming's Palace of Doom,..."). This is a different practice that comes out of an important theoretical difference.