Welcome!
Write Seattle is a collection of outstanding reading and writing tutors who also work on study skills, test prep, ESL, and more. We try to be equal parts smart and fun; we emphasize relationship-building, and our approach with each student is dictated entirely by her personality and needs. Sessions take place at libraries across the city, in your home, or online. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.
What We Offer
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What Is A Writing Tutor?
A writing tutor is a personal guide for students who are finding their voices as writers. Our writing tutors work with students of all ages and abilities, with students who find writing a struggle and those who need an extra challenge. Sessions can be organized around homework support and the editing of school essays and other assignments, or can be focused on extracurricular literary or literacy projects.
We believe that supported practice is the best way to improve writing skills. We also know that students often dislike tasks that don't come easily to them, and students who hate writing will do less of it. This can sometimes become a vicious circle. So while we're working to help students improve writing skills, we're also trying to help them find some joy in expressing themselves. Spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and other writing conventions can be taught using almost any writing project a student can imagine. So if a Write Seattle student with dyslexia also has an interest in trains and horror stories, they will almost certainly end up writing some very scary stories about some very scary trains.
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Every student's needs are different, which is why an experienced one-on-one writing tutor is such an asset to a young writer. We help students build the foundation for a lifetime of clear, unencumbered written communication, and try to make sure that they have fun while they're at it!
Dysgraphia, Dyslexia, ADHD, ASD
Every student is unique, period. Every student has a unique way of learning. For some, that uniqueness has a name: dysgraphia, dyslexia, ADHD, ASD, or something else. While we are not clinicians capable of offering diagnoses, we have experience working with students with a wide variety of abilities. Without pigeonholing or pathologizing anyone, we work to meet students where they're at and provide the individualized writing support that will allow them to flourish.
Elementary School Writing
With an elementary school writing tutor, structured practice is the name of the game. We aim to support student confidence while being strategic about editing and corrections––we're not looking for perfection! When appropriate, we look to introduce planning, sentence and paragraph structure, and revision. But no matter what, we always want to make sure our youngest students are having fun while learning to express themselves in writing!
Middle School Writing
A middle school writing tutor helps students continue to build sentence and paragraph structures while also introducing outlining and planning habits. For some students, a little bit of grammar goes a long way; for others, it's more about discovering the expressive possibilities (and the fun!) of writing. In any case, we help students develop the habits of strong, clear writing that will serve them for the rest of their lives.
High School Writing
As high school writing tutors, we continue to attend to questions of sentence and paragraph structure while also helping students muster research and evidence in their essays. The shape of the famous five-paragraph essay is usually introduced in middle school, but in high school students come to understand its relevance to academic writing that might require any number of paragraphs and a less formulaic style.
College Writing
Sometimes, nothing else will do: you need a dedicated one-on-one writing tutor to figure out what exactly these professors are asking of you. We've been through it ourselves, and we've come out alive. Now as in-person or online tutors, we've proven that we can help students get outstanding results and build skills that will serve them throughout their degrees, whether they're studying nursing or political science or the cultural practices of the giant red-headed centipede.
What Is A Reading Tutor?
Is there any academic skill as fundamental as reading? It's the respiration of an education.
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A reading tutor can serve as a guide at the outset of an reader's journey in literacy. We love being a part of that initial spurt of academic growth. One-on-one attention can make all the difference when a student seems to be struggling.
But reading is a skill like any other, one that can continue to be honed even into adulthood. We also help middle school and high school students develop strategies to improve their reading comprehension, showing them where to look for the critical information in a passage and how to keep track of arguments and ideas.
Our tutoring sessions often involve individualized, student-led projects on a subject of the student's choosing. These projects can involve both reading and writing elements, as well as time-management, accountability, and other study skills. And all the while, we make sure our sessions are engaging and fun so we can build the sort of solid rapport that will ultimately be the most important element of the tutoring experience.
Phonics
The reading tutors here at Write Seattle are lifetime learners, and the question of whether or not to use a phonics-based approach to support young readers is one about which we have learned a great deal. In the past, teachers were often encouraged to take a "whole-word" approach to reading, one in which sounding out a word was underemphasized. The idea was that students needed to find a love of reading––who could argue with that?––and that being slowed down by phonics was an impediment. But these days the consensus is changing and teachers are learning that a wide range of students can benefit from a phonics-based approach to basic literacy. Allowing students access the phonemic underpinnings of the language (i.e. helping them work through the sound elements of an unfamiliar word) has become the go-to approach of ELA teachers. And we've found that the assumptions of the past––that students find phonics boring or uninspiring––is often not true at all!
Elementary School Reading
This is the age at which the foundation for a reader's life is laid. We believe that the first task of a reading tutor is to help students discover the joy of reading in whatever way possible. Depending on the student's needs, we may develop extra-curricular projects that involve reading and writing about subjects in which they express interest, or work on phonics-based literacy development, or do all of the above. As with anything, there's no magic bullet, but practicing with an experienced reading tutor can help students develop confidence and make the most of their efforts.
Middle and High School Reading
For most students, middle school and high school are about perfecting established reading practices. Many students rush through their reading and come away without having absorbed the content. Others can't find the pleasure of reading anything that isn't on their phones. We help students change their habits of mind bit by bit, bringing equal parts rigor and unbridled enthusiasm to our lessons!
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One great resource to help middle and high school students improve reading comprehension is... studying for standardized tests! In spite of the (often deserved) disparagement of standardized testing as a method of student evaluation, the reading sections of the tests themselves––SSAT, ISEE, SAT, and ACT––make for great reading-comprehension assignments, even for students who don't plan to take those tests.
Locations
We have reading and writing tutors near you! These are our home libraries, but many tutors are able to meet at other locations by request.
Rates
For most tutors and services, we charge $68.50 for regularly scheduled one-hour online sessions and $75.50 for regularly scheduled one-hour sessions at the tutor's "home library." Many tutors can also travel to other locations by request, with the travel fee dependent on the distance.
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Please click below for more details, or contact us with any questions!
Contact Us
Tel: 206-960-8047 / Email: info@writeseattle.com