Master Writing
Exceptional writing skills matter more than ever to coursework, applications, and career competence. Writing well also teaches people how to engage and analyze the worlds around them; it nourishes a person’s interpretation abilities and communication tools for life. A vibrant writing brain enhances success in almost any endeavor.
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We work with students of all ages and writers of any level. Ideal students for this program may be struggling to craft A-grade essays or feel their regular school curriculum isn’t sufficient to advance their skills to a college-ready level. We also tailor this program for undergraduates and graduate students grappling with the demands of writing-intensive courseloads. As professional writers and expert teachers of our craft, we help students master writing through one-on-one, interactive, customized lessons.
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This program ultimately fosters self-reliant writers. The following areas form the core of our curriculum.
Read To Write
Reading is writing and writing is reading. What do we mean by this? What students read can teach them to write better; writing well can teach them how to read better. The two are mutually reinforcing. With entertaining and engaging reading assignments, we show students how to read critically in order to understand different genres of writing, discover and deploy rhetorical skills that other writers use, and glean essential elements of style.
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Know The Assignment
Writing assignments at all levels can feel vague or confusing. The first step to writing a paper is ensuring that you understand the task at hand. We help students learn how to break down an assignment and consider the options for their approach.
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Plan Well
Students love to skip the planning stage—why not just plunge into the actual writing so we can get the thing done? Well, planning well can help students get the thing done faster and more effectively; it helps avoid ruts and time-consuming rewrites. We guide students through best practices for brainstorming, choosing the best topic, gathering ideal sources and examples, organizing ideas, and outlining paragraphs.
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Draft Pro
Drafting is a creative balance. Sometimes the writing process leads to new insights that necessitate alterations to the outline. We help students conceptualize drafting not as a mechanical conversion of the outline to the essay, but as an organic process that expands their understanding of the entire project.
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This component covers the problem of analysis (what is it? how do we do it best?), the purpose of examples, paragraph structure, the meaningful flow of paragraphs, and ideal approaches to introductions and conclusions, depending on the genre of the essay.
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The Science of Sentences
If paragraphs are the limbs of your essay, sentences are the muscles. An essay with strongly crafted sentences can woo a reader into your argument and make the reader feel well-guided. Here we cover grammar essentials, the vast menu of sentence varieties, rhetorically strategic sentence types, the creative relation that sentence structure bears toward shaping tone, meaning, connotation, and emphasis.
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Vocabulary, Diction, Style
Wielding a strong vocabulary (and knowing how to deploy it effectively) can drastically improve a student’s writing. Our vocabulary component hones students’ skills in acquiring, remembering, and using vital words for their projects. We show students how diction (the lexicon they decide to use) affects the style of their writing—and how that aspect of their craft can be harnessed toward a more vigorous final product.
Revise, Revise
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All writing is revising. The first draft is a revision of the outline. The outline is a revision of the brainstorm. Revision is not just tinkering with a draft or implementing your teacher’s comments. Revision is a creative act of reconstruction. We introduce students to vivid examples of different phases along the revision process and guide them to rethink this often pesky task as an opportunity to invigorate their writing.