Professor Melzer is by far the best professor I have had at UCLA. At first, I was a bit intimidated to the fact that the class was supposed to be writing intensive in order to fulfill the writing 2 requirement, however she is so understanding that we all are at different levels of writing. This class is very interesting and you do not need to have any French background. She is very well-spoken and since the beginning of class she stresses the fact that the grades will be a reflection of improvement. Throughout the class you will have to do short summaries, pose questions in the discussion board, and you will have a midterm and final paper each requiring a minimum of 4 pages. Be prepared to learn about framing and the dominant discourse. Highly recommend. Also, Anne Le was an amazing TA, make sure to take advantage of office hours.

Melzer is very ditzy. That being said, she wanders a lot during her lectures and goes off into little details and don't matter at all. Sometimes this comes at the expense of things which will be tested on. She's never really clear on the points she's making and mostly there's a lot of stuttering and wide-eyed looks. I really thought this course was going to be interesting, it was a little actually. The readings were good and were interesting, but Melzer really took down the class. If you can take another course do it.

I took this class just for the Writing II requirement, and I really liked it. I don't speak French, so I didn't have a problem with her accent or anything like that. I found the class to be very interesting, and I especially like the assignments/grading. The essays were almost always based off the one you wrote for the last homework, just with more articles or a different focus. This was beneficial because it helped me to fix the problems with my essay, and develop it further, rather than writing a whole new essay with more/different problems I didn't know how to fix. I've never been a great writer, but I got a B+ in the class without too much effort. I really liked Melzer, I thought she was funny, and it was entertaining to watch her, with all her hand motions, and funny outfits. I definitely recommend the class, especially if you're looking for a writing class that's not boring.

I needed to take French 14 for the minor, but in retrospect I shouldn't have taken the writing version. The class was very misleading. The syllabus states that you will write a 12-page paper at the end of the quarter, but since that is such a daunting task, it will be broken up into smaller fragments that will be "woven together" at the end. She then proceeded to tell us weekly that each one-page paper that we wrote would be put into the final paper. However, as it turns out, the first four weeks consist of writing 1/2-page summaries of an article that you read, then re-writing the summary for the next week. The first four weeks only result in one page of text. After that, we began to write "papers" with a bit of an argument, but nothing that can really be used in the final paper. I enjoyed the material that was covered, but lecture was used as a time to discuss what was brought up on the class discussion board, etc. As it turned out, lecture was in no way connected to the writings we had to do. This is a good class, and Prof. Melzer is a good professor, but I wouldn't recommend the writing version.

I loved Melzer. I thought lectures were interesting and she never minded when I came in late. We did lots of discussion and debating which was awesome because the other students were very informed and had lots to say. We had a paper due almost every week which got tedious but they were short and not too difficult to write and really did help make the final paper easy to write. I had an awesome TA (David) and I got the impression that all the other TA's were really good too. I would definitely take this class if you are interested in French culture or want to be a French major or minor. Very interesting, I learned a lot and I had fun doing it! A+

I agree that Professor Melzer was very disorganized and flighty. I took her for French 14W and we spent the first 4 weeks talking about the Affair of the Headscarves, which we were only supposed to talk about for a day or two at most. Going to class was pretty pointless, Melzer never got through her planned lectures because she spent the longest time going off topic and answering questions, or letting other people debate off-topic questions all lecture. Wouldn't recommend her.

Sara is a great Prof, she is funny and has a genuine interest in the topic she is teaching (Fr 14). I would recomend her to anyone.