High School

Forum’s humanities tutors include teachers from New York’s top private schools, editors and publishers of history and literature journals, New York Times critics pick writers, and the top-awarded writers at schools like Princeton, Yale, and Brown. We work with students at top private schools and colleges looking to improve their academic writing, students working on literary podcasts and pieces published in prestigious journals like The Concord Review, and students supplementing their academics with enrichment classes on history and poetry.

Our approach towards writing—whether for history, English, or APs—is that anyone can do it brilliantly…as long as they know the rules of the game. These rules are frameworks, not only for sharp writing, but sharp thinking and sharp sessions as well. For us, teaching students to write well doesn’t just mean teaching how to construct papers with theses, topic sentences, and supporting evidence, but teaching how to read well, how to go beyond one’s peers, and how to shape a paper according to the needs of the genre, assignment, and class.

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Writing Guide: Lenses and Annotations

Poetic techniques associate one thing to another — typically through an equation or a tension.

Writing Guide: The Key Components to an Analytical Paragraph

The key elements every analytical paragraph must contain—with notes on how to manage each.

Writing Guide: Three Ways to Write Introductions and Conclusions

Strong introductions raise problems that theses resolve. Think of your paper as a detective story; here’s how to set the scene of the crime.

Writing Guide: How to Write a Thesis or Topic Sentence

Good theses and topic sentences show relationships, embody tensions, and identify a road map ahead—here’s how.

Writing Guide: Two Methods of Constructing Paragraphs using Conflicting Interpretations

Model paragraphs incorporate alternate explanations; here’s two ways to refute, modify and reconcile counterarguments to make yours stronger

Writing Guide: How to Analyze Quotes and Examples

Good paragraphs start with good quotes. Here’s how to incorporate and analyze them with multiple lenses.

Writing Guide: Three Ways to Turn Weak Sentences Into Strong Ones

Learn how to identify your weak sentences—and use these three techniques to turn them into strong ones.

Writing Guide: Four Useful Sentence Constructions (and a note on citations)

Strong analytical sentences don’t just make a point — they show why a point matters. Use these four sentence constructions for maximum impact.

Writing Guide: How to Use Subordinate Clauses

Subordinate Clauses are essential to contextualizing points and establishing counterpoint — here’s how to use them.

Writing Guide: How to Fix Dangling Participles

Dangling Participles are perhaps the most common grammatical issue out there—here’s how to fix them.

Writing Guide: Words to Set a Formal Tone

Good analytical writing doesn’t say what is definitively true, but what is probably true. Use these words to set the proper tone.

Writing Guide: Essential Nouns and Verbs

The words every essay writer should use for polished analytical sentences.

Writing Guide: Essential Transition Words

Start your sentences with these transition words to make your writing sound truly polished.