Award-Winning College Essays Tutors serving Chesterfield

This session I covered structure and clarity. The student struggled a little bit with going a little beyond to better express her ideas. She had a positive attitude. I worked to help her make her paper stronger and more clear. She scored a 92% on her exploratory paper.

Today the student and I continued to work on her writing. We began, as we have for the past few sessions, with a bit of free-writing to get her mind moving. I asked her to think of her favorite animal, and then write about how that animal represents her. She spent about 15 minutes working on this, and then we talked about what she had written. As I have mentioned before, she is a very efficient writer. By this I mean that she wants to think of three--and it's almost always three--ideas of points to make, and then argue them in very stark, clear paragraphs. This technique is certainly the basis of essay writing, but I want to get her to think more about detail, language and flow. We talked about these issues for a bit and how to incorporate them into an essay without sacrificing the basic argumentative structure. From there we turned our attention to an outline that I had asked her to write. The outline is for a prospective essay about the virtues and personality traits that a good president ought to possess. She had some very interesting ideas, but many of her points about what makes a good president simply included the word good. For example, one major point that she intends to argue in her essay is that a good president makes good decisions. The obvious question here is: well, what makes a decision good? I pushed her on this point for awhile, trying to get her to see how some of her points led to what could be called circular argumentation. This led nicely to a discussion about some of the different techniques for being persuasive in an a sustained, written argument. This was another effort on my part to get the student to think more critically and in more detail. Because her writing is so stark and efficient, it often lacks detail and leaves many potential questions left unanswered. I wanted to draw her attention to the fact that while her ideas may make perfect sense in her head, but that it is necessary in an essay to consider counterarguments or simple gaps in one's own thinking. It took some serious prodding, but I think she eventually got my point about being more precise and detailed. She is going to begin writing this essay for Friday, at which point we will begin the editing and revising stages of our work. I'm excited to see how this goes.

We had a good session - we covered the following topics- 1. Using more imagery/action in the essay - painting word pictures, utilizing dialogue. 2. Conclusions - how to formulate a good conclusion, how to integrate other elements of an essay into the conclusion's main, overarching point. 3. Style/grammar - we did some proofreading together and caught some minor errors that the student made. Overall, his grammar seems to be very good. His essay seemed to flow well and was easy to understand. There were a few mistakes in what he had written so far, but those were more a matter of typos than a lack of knowledge of certain principles. There were a few occasions where he left out prepositions that he should have used, but again, those were relatively minor errors. We also discussed how he could go forward with this essay - what he should talk about next and how he should transition into the next part of his story. I think if he keeps doing what he has been doing, he will get a good grade on this essay, and I think that, given what I have seen so far, we should be able to ensure that he gets a high grade in the class.

The student started off today's session by free writing about his topic for 10 minutes. He then responded to some questions and applied the questions to new information. By the end of the session, he had produced several pages of informal writing. We also discussed and wrote down some of the ways in which his thesis focus is evolving.

Today the student and I worked solely on editing an essay that she turns in tomorrow for her writing portfolio. We did a LOT of editing and I think the finished product was significantly improved from the original. She needed work on condensing her thesis, removing redundancy, and restructuring her conclusion. Next week we are going to do the same with another of her pieces from earlier in the term! Overall a very productive session!

The student and I worked on his application essays. We discussed the best way to respond to the two questions by pulling from previous essays we created and how to tweak portions of them so that they fully address new contexts. Then, we went over the supplemental essays from the other application to discuss how to respond to a few new questions as well as which prior essays would work well in related questions.