"Sharing information and knowledge is my life‘s passion. Tutoring and classroom teaching over the past 20 years has provided me endless opportunities for assisting others in sharpening their core communication skills in English: reading, writing, and public speaking.

With a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston and experience with all levels of students, often foreign students, I am excited to coach you. Your success is my success, be it academically or professionally. My younger students find me engaging, entertaining, and enlightening. University students know that I am well-versed in all the humanities, including postmodern theory.

Academics must connect to “the real world.” I weave content from other disciplines into my lessons so my students have a bigger, wider, deeper, and stronger contextual net of knowledge that will catch and hold more information.

If this interests you, read on. Here is how I can serve you or your student.

READING

Reading is the running of school. If you're a strong reader, all of your school work is easier. Speed and comprehension improves, giving you mastery of the subject. As well, using context clues and word roots helps grow your vocabulary. Finally, my instruction teaches readers at all levels to make thought visible. I guide students to annotate in order to comprehend more deeply. These skills transfer to formal writing as students can "hear" what good writing sounds like based on strong reading.

WRITING

Nothing creates anxiety like a blank page or screen. So students tend to put off the work until the last moment. Most then try to "type up" a paper by spilling words on a blank page hoping to fill it up.

I teach students how to scaffold the entire writing project in such a way that they are building it bit by bit. The actual "writing" - filling out sentences comes after they have their key ideas/direct quotes from the research/literary text down on paper. Now on a firm foundation, students build around it.

It is an effective paper writ" less...