Award-Winning Writing Tutors serving Chesterfield

The student worked primarily on writing and phonics (sounding out of words). When focused, he demonstrates strong skills and the ability to make great progress with reading and writing.

The student worked through his first draft for his essay over "The Scarlet Letter." He already seems to be improving on his writing - this draft looked significantly better than previous first drafts I've seen!

I worked with both the Student 1 and 2 on annotations and looking over sources. First we worked on annotating a piece from Ben Franklin's autobiography. Then, I reviewed the hand out about their upcoming assignment and we looked at several sources for their upcoming research papers, discussed whether they would be relevant as sources, and annotated some parts of those sources. It was a productive session and both students seemed to be on a good track with their assignments.

I reviewed some of the basic concepts from her psychology and art history courses. In psychology, this included language development, language criteria, neural language functioning, and language disorders. In art history, this included installation and video art. We answered the discussion questions for each of these units and began working on the psychology essay regarding the definitions of language and communication and how these two ideas differ.

We briefly went over thesis statements again. We tried to restructure the paper that is due tomorrow based on the thesis statement of the draft (each rhetorical device should be a discussed within a single paragraph). We grouped repetition (of words and phrases) in the first paragraph, images (of segregation and biblical) in the second, the use of pathos in the third, and allusions in the last. We decided to go back to the basics in order to reinforce the student's essay-writing skills. We will focus the next session on how to write introductions, the next on how to write body paragraphs, and so on. We will also use her essays from the class and revise them so that she can resubmit them for a higher grade.

At today's session, we focused on editing the student's thesis. We spent a lot of time narrowing down the specific and complete wording of his thesis and talked about how important it is to include that in the very beginning of the paper. We talked a lot about transition and topic sentences, which will make the paper much more readable and connect the material much more clearly with the thesis concept.