I Have Taught Writing to Hundreds of Students
as a Graduate Student Instructor at UC Berkeley
Classroom located in
Lafayette (Su)
Los Altos (M/W/Sat)
SF 2 blocks from BART (Tues)
Justin Sigars
justin@bayareatutoring.com
510-910-9003
Experience
I have over fifteen years experience assessing students writing and teaching them composition, both as a graduate student instructor at UC Berkeley and as a private tutor. (Currently I help write and teach the curriculum for the writing workshops and SAT classes at Ames Seminars and Growing Stars.)
Private Tutoring:
Hourly and Package Rates
The cost for a 12 hour private tutoring package is $2400. This time can be divided into sixty-minute or ninety-minute sessions. You can also choose to pay session by session. The fee varies with time, location and availability. Call or email for details. All cancellations must be made within 24 hours, emergencies and illnesses excepted.
These one-on-one sessions would take place in one of my classrooms. As tempting as at-home tutoring can be, students are, without a doubt, much more alert and receptive when they are in unfamiliar surroundings.
Preparing Students for College Writing
Parents can choose either to focus our sessions on helping their child with his or her current classes or on supplementing those classes with additional reading and writing assignments. Either way, when I tutor writing my goal is not just to quickly raise grades, but also to prepare my students for the "university essay." As a graduate student instructor at UCB, I cannot tell you how many times I saw freshman or transfer students shocked by the low grades they received on their first essays. Papers that may have received an “A” in high school because they had some good ideas often received a “B-“ in college--or worse. As a consequence, these students spent the rest of what should have been a fulfilling university experience trying to climb out of the academic hole they dug their first year.
Fear of the "In Class" Essay
As colleges (especially public universities) see their budgets dwindle, their classes assign more in-class essays and fewer take-home essays. This is because take-home essays take much longer to grade and so require more resources, whereas in-class essays don't require the same kind of feedback on grammar, style, structure etc. This provides yet another reason for colleges to want to examine such impromptu essays from prospective students as are now included in the new SAT and ACT. The problem, however, is that public high school students don’t get much practice with in-class essays. When they do write an essay in class, they often experience “brain freeze“ because of the stress of being timed, or they write in great quantities but with no focus. From my work with so many students at the high school and college level, I have found that structure helps both of these problems.
The diagramed process above, for example, helps my students concentrate on three important aspects of in-class writing: 1. Focus--Does the thesis answer the question, do the topic sentences support the thesis, and is there sufficient evidence to support the topic sentences; 2. Details--do the supporting examples have significance, detail and depth?; and 3. Is the essay long enough? I use specific exercises for improving each one of these areas.
Teaching Grammar and Style
I teach only the grammar and style that a particular student needs based on his or her writing errors. Here are some of my methods:
Sentence Variety: Color-coding different types of phrases and clauses helps my students see how complex their writing is. With this visual aid, a student can more easily increase the variety of his or her sentences.
Crutches: Every student uses crutches, from overuse of static verbs like "is" to weak transitions like "and." When I see a crutch, I remove it by telling the student not to use particular words in their next essay. Having to find substitutes forces them to think (necessity is the mother of invention), and the result is better writing.
Coherence: Sentences and paragraphs have to stick together. To this end, I show my students several paragraphs, some their own and some professionally written, then have them tell me the exact link between each sentence. Additionally, I will have students take a paragraph they have written, cut each sentence out, then give me the scraps so that I can try to reconstruct the paragraph. If I can do this successfully, the paragraph coheres.
Tools for Generating Ideas
and Analyzing Texts
Here are some methods I use with my kids to help them analyze texts AND generate ideas for their own essays:
Audience: According to the ancient Greeks, there are three types of appeals one can make to argue a point--the appeal to reason, character/tradition and emotion. You can use this triad to analyze position-essays, or to help develop your own position on a subject.
Assumptions: What does the author assume about his subject? What does he assume about his audience? We use these questions to "read between the lines," or even to develop the student's own position on a subject.
Devil's Advocate: How much do you or does the author give voice to a hostile reader? Is the opposition represented authentically, or is it not (i.e., a "straw man"). Are there essential questions an essay evokes that remain unanswered? (i.e., "begging the question")
Patterns of Opposition: Look for a dialogue of opposing voices within a text, or establish and develop them in your own essay; this is known as "deconstructing" the text, and it can be a lot of fun.
Logic: Evaluate the reasonableness of a text using the ABC test—Reasons should be Appropriate, Believable and Consistent.
Cubing: Great for free-writing on a topic, cubing includes Describing, Comparing, Associating, Analyzing, Applying and Arguing.
How Colorful is Your Writing?
Below is a piece of MLK's “I Have a Dream“ speech, with different colors distinguishing main clauses, subordinate clauses, relative clauses, and various types of modifying phrases. Most students' writing would be dominated by two colors, which means that it would be made up of short, simple sentences with not much variation in structure. This makes for tedious reading.
The New SAT Essay
My background in teaching composition makes me the perfect choice for teaching the new SAT because the test now includes a written essay that will be sent to colleges along with the student's test scores. Though the essay is only ten percent of the overall score, colleges will be able to compare it with your son or daughter's
1. English grades—are they inflated? and
2. Application essays—did s/he really write them without help?
To see which schools will look at your essay, check out their web sites.
Can't Seem to Get
Your SAT Reading Score Up?
That Should Tell You Something!
Even after preparation, a student's vocabulary and reading comprehension are often his glass ceiling on the SAT; a sure sign is if his reading score is 50-100pts lower than the other scores. Some students are just "non readers," but more often the case is that either the student's parents or the student himself is not a native speaker. Such students are at a disadvantage because they were not brought up surrounded by the same level of spoken english as students whose parents are native speakers, either from family, family friends, television programs, etc. As a result, these students have a vocabulary deficit, a difficulty comprehending sophisticated sentence structures, and a difficulty interpreting subtle textual contexts, all of which you will find on the SAT reading section. The answer? If possible, spend a summer reading and memorizing vocab. Try to average around a hundred words and three hundred pages a week. Remember, the SAT is a predicator of how well you will succeed in college, and as such you would be wise to see your lopsided score diagnostically: you will most likely suffer from this deficit in college! Therefore, it is well worth addressing in a serious way, and not just for a higher test score.
Write in Stages!
If writing is painful for you, then you probably don't write in stages. If you don't have a thesis before you start to write your paper, you end up wasting a lot of time. If you come up with your thesis before you look for textual support, your thesis will very often be wrong. If you try to develop your ideas and polish them for your audience at the same time, you will compromise both tasks. Every stage has a purpose, and to be a good writer who enjoys writing, you need to develop the skills to master each one. You simply cannot do this when you skip stages, or try to do too much at once. This is almost always the first lesson I teach my students. If they bring an essay that needs work, I make them choose which stage they want to concentrate on--their thesis, their organization, their support, or their editing.
The Problem with Learning
to Write in a Large Class
My philosophy for teaching composition is to keep the writing process as intuitive for the student as possible. Therefore, my first imperative in teaching students how to write essays is "don't fix what's not broken,“ a common sense approach which is unavailable to the high school teacher: Because no school can afford the resources to address each student individually, most English teachers are forced to teach writing as if there were a typical high school writer with typical strengths and typical weaknesses. This is just one of the reasons why college freshman writing skills are (typically) not developed enough to meet university standards--the students' unique, intuitive thinking has fallen prey to a cookie-cutter approach to writing which drains the life out of it: "don't begin a sentence with because," or, "put your transition at the end of the paragraph."
As an experienced one-on-one tutor and college composition instructor, however, I am able to prepare students for college writing by pinpointing their problems and then tailoring solutions to those problems, and I do it in a way that doesn't drive a wedge between a student's creative thinking and his prose, such as what occurs so often in a one-size-fits-all high school English class.
Public High School Students
Don't Write Enough
Many public schools' (and even some private schools') English classes assign maybe two short papers a semester. Compare this to some private school English classes that have their students write every week and oversee each step in the writing process: from free writing, to thesis, to outline, to draft, to final draft. Colleges have also recognized the great variance in schools' attention to writing, which is why they requested that the new SAT include an essay that each college can download and read for themselves.
"Close Reading" like a Writer
It is never too early or too late to learn how to “close read,“ but you must eventually master this activity in order to write well. It follows from this, then, that I cannot teach writing without simultaneously teaching a student how to read like a writer. Therefore, I have culled from freshman composition texts dozens of essays that have managed to make an impression on my own ADD-prone brain: A critical review praising the cartoon “The Simpsons,“ Swift's over-the-top satirical tract "A Modest Proposal," a comparison/contrast essay on Lee surrendering to Grant, an Annie Dillard descriptive essay about a moth flying into a candle called, not surprisingly, "Death of a Moth," a process analysis essay on dumpster diving, an argumentative essay criticizing Title IX, an informative essay on "What Makes a Serial Killer." As the student reads one of these essays, I ask him or her to underline (a new experience for students, as they are usually unable to write in their high school texts) such compositional elements as the thesis, topic sentences and transitions. One method that I have found helps them do this is to have them simultaneously read forwards and backwards. This means, for example, that if they read a paragraph and cannot determine the topic sentence, then they are to look for the support (usually much easier to spot) and, when they find it, ask themselves, "what is the support supporting?" Often you don't know what the thesis or topic sentence is until you have read somewhat beyond it.
Structure
In short, I teach my students to use the various structures of an essay to help wrap their minds around its content—it's what structure is there for. Noting elements of structure in general helps them to improve their own writing as well. Once they see an essay as a composition—a system of functional elements structured for the purpose of arguing a thesis—they can take note of what the author has chosen for a particular element of that composition, like an intro, a transition, a conclusion, etc., that works particularly well. People are born into language, I tell them, and they learn it by imitation, by trying on voices. So if they read attentively, if they do not take an essay for granted but see it as a series of conscious choices made by a flesh-and-blood person like themselves, they can add various elements to their own repertoire.
In this sense, writing is like a craft. Schools used to recognize the craft of writing and the benefits of imitation and memorization-- that is until cold-war politics created the imperative for the nation to latch on to the old myth of the “creative genius" (and its concomitant obsession with plagiarism) with as much zeal as socialists had for their own utopia. But I digress.
College Application Essays
I have assisted students with essays that have helped get them into Stanford, Berkeley, Yale—you name it! These essays often have to be short (250-500 words), which makes writing them a challenge: every sentence is precious and every mistake will cost you. Don't hurt your chances by trusting a friend or family member to proof-read.
And if you do get help from someone, make sure you have first written something authentically "you," something in your own voice, otherwise you will end up with a flawless essay with no soul. Moreover, schools may know that the essay is not you, because they can compare it with your SAT essay.
Writing Assessment
Bring in your son or daughter (along with some of his or her recent essays, both take-home and in-class) for a reading and writing assessment. I'll tell you how your child compares with his college-bound peers.
