Writing is a community endeavor, not just an individual one

I started using writing coaching services during my undergraduate studies. I saw myself grow as a writer, so I continued to seek additional coaching all through my graduate studies.

I began working as a writing coach myself during graduate school. Since then, I have coached thousands of writers in higher education: the traditional undergraduate student, vocational students switching careers, doctoral students in research and professional programs, faculty, and university staff and administrators. Many of these writers have been multilingual writers and English Language Learners.

What is writing coaching?

Good writing is born of good processes. Good processes are not innate; they must be learned. Working with a writing coach, you can learn how to better engage with your own writing, create productive writing habits, organize a larger writing project, manage anxiety around writing, and gain tools to overcome areas of writing that have been difficult for you in the past. The objective of coaching is to increase your writing productivity while decreasing stress.

Many people in my vocation call themselves a “writing tutor"; however, I find that title “writing coach” better describes my approach to working with writers. While tutoring focuses on understanding and mastering content, coaching is about developing and effectively deploying a skill set. Sports coaches provide guidance, training, and encouragement to help athletes perform at their best; thus, they don’t always work with all players in the same manner. Good music instructors, too, teach skills and techniques that build the musicianship of an instrumentalist or vocalist, which enables these musicians to appropriately interpret music on their own. Similarly, writing coaches develop the writer so that they can produce better writing.

What can I expect in a coaching session?

Coaching sessions are synchronous sessions conducted over a videoconferencing platform. Collaboratively, we will have a conversation around whichever piece of writing you bring to the session. Bringing specific goals can help us focus the session: do you want to make sure that your purpose or main point is clear? Are you worried about organization, or whether you have interpreted your evidence in a way that is compelling for your chosen audience? Do you have questions about the features of a particular genre? Do you struggle with sentence clarity or word choice and want to learn ways to make your writing clearer and more concise?

But what if we don’t make it all the way through my document?

While a coaching session often revolves around a written draft, a coaching session focuses on developing the writer, not perfecting the writing. The goal is to give you better tools for engaging with or developing your work, familiarize you with genre expectations, and teach you how to incorporate an awareness of purpose and tone appropriate to your audience. It can also focus on learning grammatical forms or best editing practices. Even when we don’t make it all the way through your piece of writing, you will be able to finish engaging with your writing on your own well after the session has ended.

Can I have multiple coaching sessions?

Depending on your goals, you can sign up for multiple sessions. Multiple sessions can help keep you accountable to continue working on a larger writing project, or it can be helpful to work with a coach throughout the process of manuscript creation, from inception to finish. I offer discounts when you purchase multiple sessions at once.

How does writing coaching help a strong writer?

Many people believe that if they are a “strong writer,” then they will not benefit from someone else looking over their work. However, all published writers have had other people’s input on their writing—fiction writers may test out drafts on a few friends or a writing group or work with agents and editors, and academic writers have their work vetted in a peer review process when they submit their research to academic journals, which often includes feedback on argument, evidence, and clarity of the writing. All of my writing has been published because I solicited and incorporated feedback from others—including other writing coaches.