Origin Story: How to Be a Writing Coach
Why did I become a writing coach? Because I had my first teaching job at Brooklyn College and faced with a classroom of Haitian immigrants, needed to learn how to teach writing. Not literature analysis, reading, or grammar. Writing using those aforementioned subjects, a sense of humor, a willingness to learn on my feet, and a deep empathy for my students struggling to remain in the United States, take care of their families and find jobs. They wrote about these things, and I found work by James Baldwin, Hemingway, Tillie Olsen, and articles in the newspaper, stories about assimilation, loss of home, and identity. We wrote and we read and I corrected their essays and found forms like letters home, poetry, and storytelling that helped them become better writers.
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Writing with Empathy
When you write with empathy, you're putting yourself in the place of the person you're communicating with. Empathy is the ability to ‘imagine’ what it would be like to experience what another person is experiencing. Empathic people are intuitive and often sense the unspoken needs, emotions or tensions of people. But what does this mean when writing a personal statement? If you can communicate your own feelings, ideas and beliefs with the focus on the reader, you will have an essay that not only defines who you are but will give the reader a chance to grow and develop with you. How does this happen? Storytelling. Concrete, engaging content that persuades the reader to continue reading. All good writing is persuasive.
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Read the Room
Coaching writers requires the ability to understand your writer and quickly scan them for a number of factors including low self-esteem, damage from poor teaching, a false sense of skill, and an overall fear of process. Your objective is to increase their confidence in themselves while establishing a relationship that welcomes feedback. In other words, read the room! Because I often work with students writing their Common Application and supplementary essays or students struggling in English or history, there is often an extra welcome challenge: parents. I am a parent; I love and respect parents but sometimes they block progress in their offspring as that offspring struggles to discover their authentic and unique voice. Parents, on the whole, view their children as gifted and wonderful.
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