Phyllis: Crest Hill tutor

Certified Tutor

My education in English Literature began early, as did my passion for the subject: I first learned to scan poetry, diagram sentences, and write essays while in grammar school. After earning the highest PSAT and SAT scores in my high school’s history (and becoming a National Merit Scholarship Finalist in the process), I traded my senior year of high school for my freshman year of college when I entered Washington University in St. Louis at the age of 17 years. I earned a B.A. in English Literature with a minor in French, and a B.S. with High Honors in Journalism and Communications. After working as a journalist (and winning numerous nationwide awards in news- and feature-writing), I decided to head back to school – this time to Rutgers University, where I earned an M.A. summa cum laude in English Literature.

While in graduate school, I learned how to write 50-page papers without blinking an eye and how to format said papers using the Modern Language Association style guide. Just as importantly, I began teaching others to do the same while tutoring at the Rutgers Writing Center and teaching freshman English Composition.

Between that time and this, my passion for the written word has never waned; I have spent more than 30 years as a professional writer and copy-editor, including two years as a co-writer of a book that became a Feature Selection in the Book of the Month Club. I have taught English Literature and SAT prep to high school students, just as I have taught writing and sentence structure to college students and English as a second language to adults privately throughout my teaching and writing career. I also have mentored my staffs of writers in the jobs I have had as a writer and copy-editor in the fields of finance (including jobs at Bank of America and Wells Fargo Advisors) and medicine (jobs at Elsevier and Pfizer).

Sharing the knowledge I have accrued brings me fulfillment and a joy that I try to instill in my students during each class or session. My teaching style is to listen, demonstrate, and guide. For example, in graduate school, I learned to write 50-page papers without blinking an eye and to format said papers using the MLA style guide. If a student needs help with an essay assignment, I recount my writing process, which includes brainstorming, prewriting, and revising again and again. I also try to be silent periodically, to give the students time to think and prepare and to share their needs and questions. I also am not afraid to be wrong or not know the answer. These instances allow the student to be wrong without shame and to learn how to find the "right" answer. I have dozens of online and hard copy resources to share, which provides a demonstration of how to search for assistance. If time is short, I look for patterns of errors that can be tackled in a single session. My goal always is to give my students the tools and self-confidence to work independently well into the future.