Socratic Learning Online Tutoring

Today's young writers are used to 30-second sound bytes and short sentence communications via Instant Messaging and chat. Confronted with a writing task, they often try to write a finished essay from first sentence to last in one sitting. This leads to much frustration and can lead to a dislike of the writing process itself.

Socratic Learning's writing lab is designed to guide students through the "process" of writing - i.e, pre-writing brainstorming sessions, drafting, revising, proof-reading and final publishing.

Completed essays (as Microsoft Word files or plain text files) go to live instructors. The essays are reviewed and returned with annotations within 24 hours. The student will receive notification via email that his essay is ready. This short turnaround time provides immediate feedback and reinforcement for the writer.

Brainstorming
Young writers are not always sure how to get started on an essay or how to organize their thoughts. Prior to getting started on an essay (or any writing project), a student may work with an instructor to brainstorm about different topics, how to develop ideas further or work on improving their grammar skills.

The Socratic Dialogs with a Writing instructor enable a student to think about: "What is my purpose in this writing? To inform, explain, entertain, persuade, analyze, reflect or tell a story? To whom am I writing? What can I assume about my audience? How much can I assume they already know about my topic?"

Review
When a student submits an essay for review, the student will receive feedback on two fronts:

a) Higher Order Review - this analysis will focus on the organization of the essay, idea development, the structure and organization of individual paragraphs, idea development across paragraphs, idea flow, etc. The instructors also offer tips on how the organization of the essay may be improved.

b) Lower Order Review - will focus on language use and style, choice of words, sentence complexity and variety, tone and voice, grammatical errors, punctuation, etc. The individualized review provides highly customized feedback and effective intervention to help all budding writers become highly proficient writers.