In college I frequently found myself helping my friends with their essays, cover letters, and professional writing. The more I did this the more I realized how much I enjoyed helping others ensure that their ideas and their intellect came through on the page. The process of taking what I know intuitively and articulating it clearly and concretely and seeing my friends internalize this was the most rewarding part of the process.
I have experience assisting highly proficient writers cut...
In college I frequently found myself helping my friends with their essays, cover letters, and professional writing. The more I did this the more I realized how much I enjoyed helping others ensure that their ideas and their intellect came through on the page. The process of taking what I know intuitively and articulating it clearly and concretely and seeing my friends internalize this was the most rewarding part of the process.
I have experience assisting highly proficient writers cut down on wordiness, improve word choice and make other stylistic improvements. I also have experience helping beginning writers with the basics of paragraph structure and evidence-based persuasion writing. I frequently helped a colleague of mine (a very capable writer in her own right) find alternative sentence structures, tweak word choice, and improve brevity in her work.
In another instance a roommate of mine asked for advice on writing a cover letter. She was earning her graduate degree in STEM, but her education and field had never given her any experience with expository writing and crafting an argument. In this process we eventually realized she had never had any type of academic writing instruction. As her level of knowledge became clear I got down to basics. I gave her a crash course in the academic paragraph, topic sentence, point, evidence etc. Line by line we went, prompting her for each point she wanted make, and showing her where she needed to put examples to demonstrate her skills and knowledge. With her I did this in outline form because that’s how I would always begin my writing process in school from my first paragraph in grade school to my senior thesis in college. If we are working on a writing assignment and I am not revising or giving comments on an existing draft, I will always have you start off by creating an outline. The outline provides the opportunity for me to teach you more abstract concepts and is a way for you to organize all your ideas and see what’s missing before you even start writing. O
