Background

Adjectival coalesced in 2022 to formalize what I'd been doing for students, friends, family and myself for years: coaching, editing, and writing.

Before then, I worked and studied for fifteen years at three universities.

I've evaluated over ten thousand pages of student writing, generated hundreds of my own, and read tens of thousands of scholarship and literature.

What did that mean in practice?

Once Upon A Time,
I Was A...

• PhD Student

I scrutinized language as carefully as a lawyer. Think twenty pages about a fourteen-line poem.

I read brilliant poetry, expert articles, and innovative fiction.

It was an immersion in the best writing of centuries. And a chance to chime in about it myself.

• Writing Professor

We worked on all the fundamentals of writing, so easy to understand and so hard to execute well:

Identify a question to answer or problem to solve, and look at the facts of the matter to develop ideas and insights. Dialogue with the minds who worked on it before. Separate important ideas from ones you don't need, find a structure for conveying them, and write sentences that are not only correct but stylish, interesting, and energizing to read.

I led my students fluidly between large groups and small conversations by running lectures, workshops, discussions and labs. And it wasn't all diagramming sentences and debating the semi-colon, because I curated courses on vital contemporary subjects like the evolving nature of romantic love. (That's how you can take a class on a ride from medieval troubadour poetry to 21st-century sociology.)

• Writing Consultant

My language chops were built with one-on-one deep dives, a half dozen writers a week with an hour for each session. I worked as a "coach" to help graduate and undergraduate writers, rapidly assessing drafts to triage problems, collaborating to set goals, delivering quick feedback, and introducing new strategies and concepts to apply in real-time.

Eyes on and hands off, it's a role I still enjoy taking for a few clients today.