Why This Matters
In the short term, elevating a student’s writing proficiency improves their grades and helps their college applications.
In the long term, writing is one of the key foundational skills of a successful life. If you can express yourself clearly and compellingly with the written word, you have a powerful advantage -- in academic settings, in the working world, even in your personal dealings.
Strong writing skills elevate careers: the non-profit executive who becomes indispensable by composing successful grant applications; the Hollywood assistant who gets promoted because of his incredible script coverage; or the software engineer who gets short-listed for CTO because of her articulate communications with higher management.
But writing really does extend to every aspect of our lives. If you want to ask for an extension on a paper, you have to craft an effective, sympathetic request to your professor. If you’re asked to speak at a wedding or funeral, you have to figure out what insights to convey about your loved one, and how exactly to convey them. And if you ever want to start a business, you’ll have to lay out a clear, compelling vision on paper for partners and investors.
In short, writing matters.
The Challenge
The way we learn to write is fundamentally flawed.
Writing requires our brains to juggle several very difficult conceptual processes at the same time. But our educational system never really identifies those component tasks, explains them clearly to us, and has us practice them independently.
So by the time students get to high school English class and are being asked to close-read a difficult text, extract thoughtful and supportable insights, organize a set of subtly distinct ideas across and within paragraphs, express it all in sentences the reader can follow easily, and so on, is it any wonder that so many of them are overwhelmed?
And this puts teachers in a bind. They do their best to give helpful feedback, but they are processing tons of student work, most of which has an array of overlapping problems. And they lack the time and bandwidth to dig deeply into the process itself, which is where the challenges really lie.
Often, parents of struggling students turn to outside help. But a tutor coming in to help with a difficult paper has one job and one job alone: get that paper in shape! They do triage, try and lead the student to better ideas, and often end up just pitching better ideas for the student to consider. The sad truth is: this process is diametrically opposed to making students better writers. It requires a mad dash toward their paper deadline and a ‘whatever it takes’ attitude that often leads to the tutor taking on an overly collaborative role.
What the student actually needs is to slow down, take a big step back, and work on the fundamentals.
Our Mission
We want our students to look back on their time with McCollum and think: “That was the moment I got writing.”
The blank page is a scary thing to most writers, whether beginner or professional. We want to give our students an approach they can take with them anywhere. We want writing to no longer mean throwing words on a page and banging them around in the hopes they end up kind of making sense -- but rather an intentional process of consideration, insight, organization, and expression.