"Hi there! My name is Lavender. I am a recent graduate from Bennington College with a BA in English, and am now pursuing an MA in Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon. While at Bennington, I worked as a one-on-one English tutor for 2 years, helping peers with essays in a variety of areas, from finals for freshman intro classes to senior theses. I currently work at Carnegie Mellon as a Communication and Language Support Consultant (a tutor by another name), where the breadth of topics is even greater. My own work tends to be focused on theories of relationships: those we construct between ourselves and others, and those we construct as readers and writers with the things we read and write. I do my best to bring that into the way I tutor.

One of the most important things in tutoring is a respect for the student's intelligence and instincts. It's lovely seeing the way someone's eyes light up when they land on the thing they want to write about, and following that urge leads to essays that go beyond checking each box on the rubric. Grammar and syntax and knowing how to cite a source in MLA is important, but writing well requires more than writing correctly. In much the same way, reading is the first step to any critical analysis, but you can't get much further than plot summary without an understanding of the relationships the author is drawing between characters and setting, between the book and the rest of the world.

I consider my areas of expertise to be literary analysis and essay writing. As such, I am well suited for SAT and ACT prep in Reading/Writing/English, proofreading and editing college application essays, as well as college level English or Literature assignments." less...