Screenwriting

A former student, now in grad school at NYU, writes:

But he has no idea how to write a screenplay.  When one of the students asked if the descriptive language should go where we describe the scene, he said "Sure, all the flowery language should go there.  It's no different from writing a book."  I almost burst out laughing and was hard pressed to keep my mouth shut for the rest of the class.  

This was not in a screenwriting class but an exercise in a creative writing class -- but speaks to the widespread wrong info about screenwriting out there, even in classes in respectable schools. This was a lazy teacher because it is very easy to document that screenwriting is very different indeed from writing a book. I see this sort of thing more often than I'd like and it's always depressing. The students are the ones who suffer.