Ben S.

Writing, literature, ESL, languages tutor

Writing, literature, ESL, languages tutor

I’m Ben, a professional writer with a degree in Classical languages. I offer tutoring in three subjects: writing (college, high school, other), English as a Second Language (all levels), and ancient languages/literatures (Biblical Hebrew and Classical/New Testament Greek).

As a writer I’ve published with The Paris Review, Bookforum, Hyperallergic, and several other publications. I was a part of the fiction selection process at The Paris Review, and have published essays about literature for years. In Winter 2019, I was a writer-in-residence at Arabesque in Akko, Israel. My creative work consists mainly of short fiction. Working with you on short fiction, a novel, or other creative piece (including nonfiction) would delight me to no end. If you would like help with college or high school essays, I am equipped to do that as well (I published two papers about the Middle East, ancient and modern, in journals as an undergraduate at Macalester College).

If you are a non-native speaker of English and would like to improve your conversational skills, I am the right person for you. Typically sessions will last an hour, with 20 minutes of casual discussion, and 40 minutes on a topic we’ll both agree upon beforehand. As we get to know one another better, the casual discussions will get longer. I correct some mistakes as we talk, but I believe that allowing you to speak with fluency is more important than pointing out every imperfect sentence construction. I realize that speaking often comes much faster than composition, so if you are struggling in school with writing in English, I am more than happy to work on that as well. If you are a beginner, we can do listening, speaking, and writing exercises that will improve your grasp on the language and equip you to soon have free-flowing conversations in English. Different exercises work better for different students, so we will figure out as we go how you learn best and what tools are most helpful to you.

Finally, I teach all levels of Biblical Hebrew and Classical/New Testa