Why Choose Cara Kalf as Your College Essay Coach?
Maybe you already know a college essay coach is a great way of improving your writing skills while improving one of the most important writing assignments you’ll have as a high-schooler. If that’s the case, the only question you might be left with is … how do I choose the right one?
What You Should Look for in an Essay Coach
The first thing most people want to know is … Where have your students gotten in? But that’s far from the most important question (more on that later). You’re looking for the right combination of skills, experience and personality. Your college essay coach will be your teacher, coach and cheerleader for a long, difficult project—you want to make sure both that they bring all of the tools to best teach you and that you will work together well.
First Critical Skill: Writing
At the risk of being obvious, a writing coach needs to understand writing. But a great writing coach needs to understand not just how to write well—but why a writer makes the decisions they make. They need to understand at each stage of the process how they are doing what they are doing. (“First you need an idea” won’t cut it. The struggling writer knows what they need to do—they just don’t know how to get there.) A writing coach needs to be able to break down the writing process and describe each of the steps in detail.
For that reason, you don’t want to simply hire the best writer you can find (though that’s a fine place to start looking!). A great writer does not necessarily make a great writing coach. The “expert blind spot” makes them forget the pieces a beginner would struggle with. Someone with a lot of natural talent might never have had your struggles and might not be able to give you a way out of or around them. They will not necessarily be able to help you recreate their success. Your goal is not just to talk through your ideas with a great writer and have them help you turn your ideas into an essay. Your goal is to learn how to access your ideas and develop them, so that you can repeat the process in the future.
Second Critical Skill: Teaching
A great writing coach needs to be able to explain in a variety of different ways. Different explanations or metaphors speak to different students. If the writer understands their process but only explains it using a particular structure or model, that might not work for you. An experienced classroom teacher is a great choice because they’ve had to explain a variety of topics to hundreds of students. They’ll be prepared to explain and re-explain until they’ve communicated in a way that best speaks to you.
Further, they’ve seen many examples of the types of difficulties young writers have. Whether or not a teacher has ever had a particular writing challenge themselves, they’re likely to have encountered it and even solved it with one or more students. They’ll have the experience to help you, too.
Third Critical Skill: Editing
A great writing coach really needs to be a professional editor. You do not want a coach who only understands what good writing sounds like in their own writer’s voice. Many, many adults in your life—if you ask for their feedback—will make changes that are more about their personal preferences or their own style than about actual errors you may have made. Usually, they don’t realize they are doing this. Something sounds “off” to them, so they rewrite it in the way they would write it, rather than asking (either you, or themselves) what you truly meant and how you might say it better or more clearly.
An experienced editor understands what a writer means, even when they’re less than clear. A really great editor recognizes what poor writing is getting at and can actually help a writer extract their own ideas—even when the writer wasn’t sure what they meant initially! The editor can read the muddled ideas and see a picture emerging that the writer was working toward, but not clear enough on in their own head to articulate. This will be even more successful when the editor knows the writer, as in an ongoing coaching relationship. This is why working with an editor live, instead of just getting written feedback, is so important and what will make the difference between an essay that’s truly yours, and one edited by a stranger.
So Which Is the Most Important Skill?
There are many solid writing coaches out there, but most of them come from only one or two of those backgrounds. A great writer may not teach or explain well, and may be too accustomed to their own voice to be a good editor. A great teacher may be excellent at explaining, but not very strong on a writer’s process because they don’t actually do it very often themselves. They might be too accustomed to offering correction to be a good editor. A great editor may not be able to teach you how to get better for the future.
What makes me different as a coach is my experience in all three areas. I am an experienced writer who understands the process, an experienced teacher who can break down what I know and clearly explain how to follow the process, and an experienced editor who can understand what you’re trying to say (even when you’re not clear) and help you write it better, while still sounding like you.
OK, but … seriously, where have your students gotten in?
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on these pages, my students have gone on to many great schools you’re hoping to hear—Northwestern, Dartmouth, Duke, Stanford, NYU, Syracuse, for some examples. They’ve collected numerous acceptances, including Early Decision acceptances to their first-choice schools. Some get significant scholarship money.
But please don’t let those kind of results skew your decision in favor of any coach. What that tells you—above and beyond what I bring to the equation—is that I work with talented students. You cannot know, when evaluating a writing coach, how much their work changed a student’s overall application package.
What you can know is how the students felt about their coach’s work and how it changed their essays and application experience. So look for testimonials like,
“When I first started this essay, I had no idea how to do it. And now I’m looking at it, and—WOW! I’m doing it!”
“I feel like you really helped me improve my writing process as a whole and I’ll definitely bring the skills you taught me into college.”
“Thank you so so much for helping me with everything and making the impossible seem possible.”
… all things my former students have written or told me as we finished up our work, or when they wrote later to tell me of their acceptances.
Find Your Cheerleader
Once you’ve established that a coach has great skills and experience (maybe backed up with great acceptances), the last step is personality. Testimonials, blog posts and social media will all give you a taste of what it would be like to work with a particular coach.
But if you’re wondering if we’ll be a good fit, why not just schedule a free 15-minute consultation ? We can chat about your goals, your application plan (where it’s at and where it should be headed), and how a college essay coach might fit into your plan. Why struggle through on your own, when instead you can turn this experience into the best possible preparation for what’s next?
