If you like evolutionary psych and/or AI, this is your guy. LONG tangents, often on things that seem over the line to tell students. As an English major, everything introduced in this class had already been taught to me. However, this is a decently easy class (participation, a few short assignments and papers + revisions). Go to class. No canvas.

Although his tangents seemed seemingly unrelated to most things, if you listen carefully you can figure out his main point lol. Lots of back and forth discussion between him and the class, very engaging at least. All papers are eligible to be revised for a better grade and he does individual meetings to give personal feedback. Overall good!

I overall enjoyed this class and felt like I learned a lot. He heavily emphasizes the need to learn grammar rules so I needed to brush up on some of those skills. I see negative feedback on here but I'm not sure where that is coming from. He also allows corrections on papers at the end of the quarter to receive a higher grade

Samuels is hilarious and a great professor, Im not sure why theres so much negative feedback here. Hes very interesting and I found the class to generally be easy.

If you're a decent writer, this class is easy. He genuinely cares about improving your writing and taught a lot of tips other professors hadn't touched on. Participation is mandatory, which is annoying but not as painful as I thought it would be. He goes on a lot of tangents, but they can be pretty entertaining and make class time go faster.

Having graduated from UCSB two years ago, I constantly find myself looking back at my life-changing experience in this class. You will learn to employ a wide range of rhetorical techniques in your own writing, but importantly, youll leave with a deep awareness of how rhetoric is used to shape the public. You will not want to miss a single lecture.