FAQs

How does your professional background inform your work with students and adults?

For more than 20 years, my award-winning writing and editing have been featured in publications by Harvard University, MIT, world-class research hospitals, and other prominent institutions. The skills I have developed working alongside global thought leaders are the exact same skills I share with my students and professional clients. All effective writing begins the same way: with critical thinking, brainstorming, strategic organization, and a clear understanding of form and audience—whether you’re writing analytical or college entrance essays, research papers, fiction or poetry, journal articles, blogs, or any other type of writing project.

Why did you become a writing tutor and writing coach?

As the Publications Director and Editor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for seven years, I published countless articles about the life-changing impact of excellent educators. Compelled to use my writing and editing skills to directly help others, I moved on to teach at a prestigious private high school and then as a writing professor in a graduate degree program. Meeting individually with students and professionals enables me to provide a deeply personalized educational experience to all my students. Nurturing one-on-one relationships with my clients emboldens struggling writers to take new risks. I really do love helping people develop writing skills that open the doors they want to walk through. 

How do you describe your experience as a virtual writing tutor and virtual writing coach?

I have been working remotely with students and professionals for more than a decade now. My work with students at premier boarding schools expanded to tutoring high school and college students across the country. My work with professors at elite universities led to editing the writing of highly-skilled professionals in a broad array of fields, including medicine, finance, social science, and higher education, as well as coaching adults returning to graduate school.

Working interactively online, I observe and instruct clients—in real time—as they learn to fully express their ideas.  My tutoring and coaching include providing detailed feedback, individualized action steps, checklists that reinforce new learning, organizational strategies, revision protocols, and grammar instruction.

Do you work with students and professionals whose first language is not English?

My clients hail from all around the globe, including China, Europe, India, Japan, Korea, and Saudi Arabia. I help first- and second-generation English speakers learn to write effectively, assertively, and gracefully in English, while also repairing their common grammatical mistakes.

As a compassionate and caring online tutor to students, I fill the gap between foreign-born parents and their US educated children—explaining educational expectations, idioms, and common cultural references.

Do you teach students critical thinking, in addition to writing skills?

Critical thinking enables students to determine what they wish to communicate. This is why my work begins with deep questioning of the topic at hand. I help every writer discover their own unique ideas. Discovering and illuminating their best idea is both the purpose and the goal of writing.

How do you describe the range of students with which you work?

My students’ abilities and interests cover a broad spectrum. I love that diversity!

Some of my students are gifted, and seek deeper thinking and forms of expression. Other students enjoy writing and crave enrichment opportunities that are not offered in their schools, including creative writing, personal essay writing, blogging and more; some of these students submit their work to contests and publications. Most of my students seek homework assistance and individualized skill development; this includes students who have IEPs and 504 plans, due to mild/moderate executive functioning challenges, ADHD, processing speed and word retrieval difficulties, along with other hurdles. All my students have their own special skills and interests, which I leverage to make meeting school expectations a more engaging and successful experience.

All my students come to share one essential quality: a desire to learn. This is all that matters— and one of the most important reasons that they succeed.

What are some of the colleges and universities your students have gained admission to?

The broad range of colleges and universities that my students have been admitted to include: Bates, Bennington, Bowdoin, Boston University, Boston College, Brandeis, Bryn Mar, Carnegie Mellon, Colby, Cornell, Curry, Dartmouth, Georgetown, George Washington, Harvard, Massachusetts College of Art, Middlebury, Middlesex, Rensselaer Polytech, Sara Lawrence, Smith, Stanford, Tufts, Tulane, University of California/Berkeley, UCLA, University of Chicago, University of Michigan/Ann Arbor, University of Pennsylvania, University of Rochester, University of Vermont, University of Virginia, University of Wisconsin/Madison, Vanderbilt, and more.

My students study subjects including business, communications, computer science, education, economics, engineering, international affairs, literature, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, psychology, public health, sociology, social work, visual art, as well as other subjects, earning bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees.