Writing Coaching and Enrichment
We offer writing coaching for students from elementary school through college.
General Tutoring and Enrichment
We design an individualized curriculum for each of our students. We've covered a wide range of genres and topics with past students, including:​
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Academic writing: informational essays, literary/rhetorical analysis, argumentative papers, and research assignments
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Non-academic writing: personal essays, short stories, poetry, and screenwriting
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Building proficiency throughout the writing process: brainstorming, drafting, revising, and polishing
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Writing habits: planning and organization, time management, beating procrastination, and other executive functioning skills
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Writing mechanics: tone, sentence structure, diction, and concision
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Grammar and spelling: we’ll spare you our spiel about schools not teaching grammar anymore; suffice it to say, we consider grammar important and emphasize it accordingly
This list isn’t exhaustive, so if you’re looking for help with something else, please reach out!​
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Addressing Writing Struggles​
We specialize in supporting students who experience significant difficulty with writing.
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Often, these challenges are related to one or more of the following: autism, ADHD, executive functioning issues, learning differences/disabilities, slow processing speed, dyslexia, dysgraphia, expressive language delay.
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Although we are not mental health professionals, we have experience supporting students who have mental health diagnoses that affect writing and academics (anxiety, depression, etc.).
Our students’ struggles tend to fall into three categories:
Executive functioning challenges:
“I get stuck.”
“I don’t know where to start.”
“I don’t know what to do next.”
“Writing takes forever.”
“I procrastinate.”
“I struggle to finish on time.”
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Writing-specific issues:
“I don’t know what to write.”
“I write, delete, rewrite, delete…”
“I don’t understand the assignment.”
“I’m not sure how to organize my thoughts.”
“I don’t know how to make my essay longer/shorter.”
Difficult thoughts and emotions:
“I can’t do this.”
“I’ll never get there.”
“I’m bad at writing.”
Anxiety, frustration, dread
If these statements sound familiar, please reach out or schedule a consultation. We’d love to help you overcome these obstacles and find an approach to writing that works for you.
How we teach
Whether we’re studying grammar, coaching college essays, or building storytelling skills, three key concepts inform our work.
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Make it fun
At the start of tutoring, many students tell us that they dislike (or even hate) writing. But we find that this isn’t necessarily true. Students don’t dislike writing; they dislike the type of writing they’ve encountered in school. Because school writing can be unpleasant, students avoid it. They therefore have fewer opportunities to build skills, which means that they struggle more and like writing even less.
We reverse this cycle by exposing students to a different type of writing, the kind that’s engaging, meaningful, and fun. We also let students’ interests and strengths guide our curriculum. Does a student love K-pop? Great! Let’s write about K-pop, read some cultural commentary from magazines like The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and even do a deep dive on the intricacies of translating song lyrics. Or maybe they’re huge fans of video games, sports, cooking, YouTube, science, cats…You name it, we’ll turn it into a writing lesson. These positive associations accumulate and shift students’ attitudes. Writing stops feeling like a chore and becomes a vehicle for self-expression.
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We're big Calvin and Hobbes fans.
Emphasize process and product
Our goal in tutoring is to help students build skills, and we divide these skills into two categories.
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Process skills have to do with how a student writes. These include breaking a project down into discrete steps, managing time effectively, drafting, revising, and reflecting on one's own writing process.
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Product skills are about what a student writes. Can they communicate ideas clearly? Is the text organized logicallyw? Does the student use varied sentence structures and appropriate word choice? Is their writing free of grammatical errors? Can they tackle a range of genres and adjust their writing voice accordingly?
These are just a few examples of areas we target when coaching. Of course, every student is unique, and we design individualized curricula based on students’ strengths, weaknesses, and goals.
We like to use the revision history feature in Google Docs to help students reflect on their writing process and think about time management. Here, we can see that Lucy was hard at work on an essay about the game theory of performance-enhancing drugs all the way back in 2022...
Draw on principles of effective learning
Over the past five years, Lucy has lived a double life, working as a tutor and studying psychology in tandem. The WAG approach is thus grounded in the principles of educational psychology. We help students reach what researchers call the zone of proximal development–that is, the sweet spot where students are pushed just beyond their comfort zone.
In the ZPD, we use a strategy called scaffolding to help students learn. Scaffolding involves providing active guidance, then gradually fading out that support as a student becomes more confident. The first time we introduce a technique, we might coach a student on each individual step. Once they’ve grown more proficient, we’ll ask them to get started on their own. Eventually, the student will independently use the skill in a range of contexts.
Wikipedia isn't always the most reliable source, but we think this image is fair game.