ONLINE TUTORING:
TRANSFORMING STUDENTS INTO WRITERS
Learning Beyond the Classroom
ABOUT
WRITING WELL LLC
Eileen Mills of Writing Well LLC helps middle and high school students improve their writing skills, produce effective academic and application essays. She helps students advance their already competent writing skills; or she supports students who struggle with writing. With Eileen’s guidance, students learn how to produce successful pieces of writing. They also develop critical thinking skills, learn how use appropriate grammar, and engage in active reading.
SPECIALITIES
Results That Last
Application Essays for College and Secondary Schools
Applications essays can ask students to describe a meaningful activity, provide insight into their perspective or personality, demonstrate self-growth or collaboration skills, define their identity, explain their academic curiosity, reveal a weakness, or a loss, or a failure, illustrate their ability to be creative thinkers, or explain their dreams for the future. These requests require that students are able to reflect on their lives and determine their own significance as a citizen of today’s world. Often, students need encouragement, support, and positive feedback in order to produce effective essays. Eileen provides application essay support that is specifically tailored to each student’s need. Eileen helps students craft strong application essays by offering the following instructional processes where students: rate a variety of application essays from strong to weak (not available for secondary school essays), brainstorm to settle on a workable topic, outline essay, and revise for content and language. Sessions are focused on, not what students shouldn’t do, but rather, on what is possible. Students need not engage in all instructional processes. In order to produce a successful application essay, some students may just need one or two sessions while other students may need more.
Academic Writing
Eileen meets with her students in a one-on-one conference. During these sessions, students are taught how to write effective academic essays based on students’ actual academic writing assignments. She helps students learn how to analyze prompts, collect information by actively reading texts or gather research and then actively read that research, draft thesis (if applicable), organize and/or outline, draft, and revise. Students receive grammar instruction based on their individual needs during the drafting and revising process. Instruction in appropriate methods of documentation, such as MLA and Chicago Manual of Style, are covered, if needed. Eileen also provides students with help on taking notes on readings, writing short answers to study questions, and producing study guides for exams.
EILEEN’S BACKGROUND
Almost twenty years ago, Eileen started a writing tutoring business for middle and high school students called Writing Well LLC. She has consulted at Southern New England School of Law (now UMass Law School) where she designed an exam-writing program and trained peer tutors. She taught at Dedham Country Day School for one year as a seventh grade English teacher. She was the Director of Writing for the Charles Hamilton Houston Enrichment Program at New England Law. There she tutored first year law students about legal writing, designed an exam-writing seminar, and recruited, trained, and managed peer tutors. She was a lecturer in English at Northeastern University. While at Northeastern, she was also the Assistant Director of the Writing Center where she managed and trained peer tutors. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English, magna cum laude, from Framingham State College, with a Master of Arts in English from Boston College and with a Master in Technical and Professional Writing from Northeastern University. She was also a member of the Walpole Scholarship Foundation serving as a reader, trustee, and the Secretary of the Executive Committee.
