Tutor profile: Sarah G.

How can a tutor help with college admissions?

I am able to help with the brainstorming, editing, and revising of essays; I can also help students think through and plan out their overall approach to admissions. The college search process, and the subsequent application process, can be daunting, and it can be hard to know where to start. As someone who has been through the admissions process herself, and has helped other students like you, I like to think I have learned a few things!

List, in no particular order, terms and concepts that would be important when writing an essay about the Reconstruction Era. (Though not demonstrated here, a follow up activity could involve arranging these terms into a study diagram, or writing the outline for a hypothetical essay)

Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln's Assassination Carpetbaggers The Ten Percent Plan Grandfather clauses Literacy tests Republicans, Democrats, Radical Republicans, Liberal Republicans Andrew Johnson Black codes Freedmen's Bureau Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments Civil Rights Act of 1875 Sharecropping Ku Klux Klan Slaughterhouse Cases Compromise of 1877 Suffrage Confiscation Acts

Given the sentence "Sally was able to give her dog a quick bath," describe the function of each word in the sentence and how they relate to each other.

The two basic components of most sentences are the subject and the verb, with some exceptions. In this case, the subject (the person or thing doing something) is the noun "Sally," and the verb (what the person or thing is doing) is "to be." In this sentence, the verb "to be" is kind of hidden in what we call the verb phrase, which is the verb AND all the other words that affect it. In this sentence, the verb phrase is "was able to give." "Was" is the verb "to be" in the past tense; "able" is an adjective (it describes the subject, "Sally"); "to give" is an infinitive that acts as an adverb. The reason "to give" is acting as an adverb is because it is modifying the adjective "able" - only adverbs can modify adjectives! The last two chunks of the phrase are objects - the parts of the sentence that are being governed by verbs. "Her dog" and "a quick bath" are the two objects in this sentence. To break it down a little further, "a bath" is a direct object - it tells you *what* Sally was able to give to her dog. Meanwhile, "her dog" is an indirect object - Sally is giving a bath TO her dog. Each of these objects, like the verb phrase, are made up of multiple parts. "Her dog" is a possessive pronoun ("her") plus a noun ("dog"). "A bath" is an article ("a") plus a noun ("bath.") One thing that is important to remember when decoding sentences like this is that all the words interact! Although "Sally," "dog," and "bath" are all nouns, they each serve a very different purpose. So when trying to interpret or decode complex sentences, it is not just the nature of the individual words that matter, but their relationships with each other.