General-purpose English tutoring

Jim B.

I'm a sometime-writer with a love of science-fiction, fantasy, and queer storytelling, as well as a PC and tabletop RPG gamer and all-around nerd. Catch me recognizing artistic value and literary insight in pop culture phenomena ordinarily ignored by the academic establishment.
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I have worked as a peer writing tutor for everyone from elementary students to college students, so I know how I can help everyone from struggling new readers to accomplished essayists. I also have experience tutoring English for students whose first language is not English, and am comfortable serving as a tutor in that capacity. My favorite thing about tutoring is its sense of steady progress. The ability to look back at previous work and see what has changed, to know what you know now that you didn't know before, is immensely satisfying, and I love imparting that to students whenever I can.

I have a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English and Creative Writing from the University of Iowa. I've spent considerable time reading everything from novels to textbooks to instruction manuals, so I know what good writing looks and sounds like, and I can pass that knowledge on to students. I have experience both as a private, one-on-one or in-home tutor and as an institutional tutor, so I can tailor tutoring sessions to private objectives or aid in achieving the goals of established curriculum, as required.

My job as a tutor is to help students learn how to teach themselves. If I am successful in my tutoring, at its end, my students will know how to ask themselves the right questions to teach themselves whatever they want to know--or at least be closer to that goal. The most important thing I can pass on, as a tutor, is not the pronunciation of a word or the proper citation method for a particular research source, but the ability to find those gaps in one's own knowledge and figure out how to fill them without needing a tutor.