Kothari
Writing
San Diego, CA
“I love your writing style, Sparsh. You keep things moving and your descriptions are so awesome! I can see in my mind the intricate details that you're writing about. :) Your writing is beautiful, and your punctuation is spot on. Honestly, I have not seen a manuscript in this good shape in a very long time.” —Angela Hoy,
Publisher at WritersWeekly.com
Writers Workshop
$1500/5 sessions, 75 minutes
Consultation: free, 1/2 hour
Intake/Evaluation: $100, 60 minutes*all costs are prepaid and will operate on a predetermined sliding scale, factoring in client’s financial viability
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In-person or virtual environment
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Material covered:
Reading comprehension
Grammar
Creative Writing
Essay Writing
Narrative Writing
Analytical WritingCustomized Curriculum as per client's needs
Suggested Curriculum Approaches Described Below Reviews
Publishing
Kothari Publishing
Book Locker #1 Best Selling AuthorPublisher’s blog
Contact & Alma Mater
University of California, Berkeley
2012
B.S. Electrical Engineering, College of Engineering
B.S. Computer Science, College of Letters & ScienceSparsh Kothari
LinkedIn
(858)-449-8270
[email protected]
Reviews
Laura Holk (client)
"Our experience with Sparsh as an academic and writing consultant has been very rewarding. Sparsh’s unique teaching style blends strong people-skills with a focused mentality, pleasant and motivating personality, and effective command over the knowledge and material he is teaching. Sparsh is punctual and readily available to consult with his clients multiple times a week. He rarely misses a scheduled appointment and is very communicative with his clients on their progress in growing and developing their writing, creative, and communication skills. I would certainly recommend Sparsh as a consultant for any type of client he serves."Elise Yung (client) Gabriel Yung (tutee), APUSH
Scored 5 on AP US History DBQ Writing Exam
"Sparsh has shown countless times his ability to adapt to new challenges and direct me into the necessary path for academic success and his hard work outside the tutoring sessions has helped the hours we have together become more meaningful and more productive. His character is one I’ve been able to connect with and his constant joy and positive mindset pushes me to work harder and follow his great advice. His immense knowledge only adds on to the many pros that make Sparsh the best tutor I’ve ever had, and his work ethic elaborates on the certainty that Sparsh will not fail his client and will do everything in his power to tutor him to the best of his abilities."Ames Kinkead (client)
Improved score from 21 to 31 on ACT
Sparsh has been an amazing academic consultant and an even better mentor. Sparsh helped me gain over ten points on the ACT from my first practice test to my latest score. Sparsh has every bit of credit to my success. He catered our sessions based off what worked best for me. Sparsh challenged me to push my limits and set expectations that I didn’t think I could achieve. The amount of work he put in on his own time shows me how dedicated he is to helping his clients. Not only did he help me academically; he was also involved with other parts of my life. Whether asking about my soccer team, or calling me after tests to ask me how it went, Sparsh cared for me on a personal level, and that is irreplaceable. I’d like to thank Sparsh very much for the incredible work we have done together and I look forward to working on college essays with him!
Approaches
One
While each curriculum will be customized as per the client’s needs, we provide here a highly recommended format for the course. Our first objective is to develop, enhance, and resolidify our client’s writing, analytical, and communication skills through rigorous essay writing both in session and for homework. Our next objective is to help our client visibly expand the scope and skills of their creative, imaginative, and artistic writing through deeply engaging sessions of mutually informing dialogue where unknown, uncomfortable, and complex thoughts (as it relates to narrative and creative writing) are prudently and carefully pondered upon, expanded, processed, and utilized to inform the imaginative and emotional ideas sprouting from the active healthy mind of our client.In practice, this means the first ten weeks, or twenty sessions, will be focused on rigorous essay writing both in and outside of the session. Each session we will be taking a new essay prompt and writing a full essay within the time period allotted. If our client has chosen the advanced package and is attending ninety-minute sessions, then we will try to get through 1.5 to two essays per session. This intensive process will involve us guiding our client step-by-step in creating each sentence, paragraph, and idea of the essay. For homework, our client will be assigned to write full essays on three to five new essay prompts to complete by the following week. We also require mandatory daily reading—seven days/week—of five (comprehensive, thorough, as opposed to non-substantive or limited substance) news articles from five different news sources, providing a summary and brief analysis for two of the articles read. During the first or second week of the course, our client will be prompted to select a novel of his or her choice to read and finish during the first nine weeks of the course. She will be required to write a summary after every chapter she reads and compare that to a reference source like sparknotes and see how her analysis did or did not match up with the source. At the end of nine weeks, we will spend week ten developing a full literary analysis of the book, forming a critical thesis as it pertains to a main theme of the book and defending and arguing for that thesis in a literary essay.Weeks eleven through twenty is where the essay writing stops and the fun begins. During each of these weeks, we will spend one session in complete oral dialogue, practicing our communication skills and translating our thoughts about what we’ve read or wrote into speech and discussion. The other session will be focused on developing a short story envisioned and fully written by our client. By week twenty, the goal is to have a fully drafted (and hopefully edited) manuscript of which our client can utilize to her liking: she can go seek out an editor, reviewer, or publisher to finalize and publish or self-publish the manuscript on Amazon, or she can directly go and self-publish the manuscript on Amazon. In either case, our client will be required to submit her manuscript or published story to at least four different book reviewers. Of course, a cover will be required, which we leave for our client to choose and create. In essence, one of the main tangible outcomes of this course is that our client will be or will be on her way to becoming a published author and writer.
Two
*Due to the demanding goal of this approach, sessions will be required to be 90 minutes each.The approach harnessed in this curriculum is distinctly different than the approach taken in curriculum one. While the first approach emphasized rigorous essay writing both outside and in the session for the first half of the course, the second approach will require no essay writing in class for any session. Naturally, this suggests that the goals of the second approach, while sharing similarities with the goals of approach one, are different: where approach two lacks in in-session essay writing, it makes up for in its ambition. For the first ten weeks, the homework assigned will be exactly the same as assigned in approach one, so there will be plenty of essay writing being done, but all of it outside of the sessions. While approach one is focused on developing a short story and enhancing oral communication skills in the second half of the course, approach two is focused on using the entire set of sessions in the course to plan, design, develop, and write a novel. Every session will entirely take place in a mutual dialogue between the consultant and client—similar to a therapy session but without psychological analysis, evaluation, and diagnosis—where, as referenced in approach one, unknown, uncomfortable, and complex thoughts (as it relates to narrative and creative writing) are prudently and carefully pondered upon, expanded, processed, and utilized to inform the imaginative and emotional ideas sprouting from the active healthy mind of our client.In practice, the first two to three weeks will be focused on personal reflection, inspiration, and ideation. In each of these sessions, the consultant and client will carefully work through emotional, spiritual, and visceral feelings, contemplations, and reflections to bring about an inspirational idea or tone which helps lead to a concrete vision for the novel. The remaining seven to eight weeks in the first half of the course will then be focused on developing the outline, design, motifs, main characters (if any at all) of and introduction to the novel. The second half of the course, where there will be no more essay homework being assigned, will be focused wholly on writing, completing, and perhaps editing once through the novel. As in approach one, by the end of week twenty, the client should have a fully completed manuscript which she can utilize to her liking: she can formally go to a publisher or editor to finalize and publish the manuscript, or she can directly (thoroughly edit and then) self-publish the novel on Amazon, or she can choose not to publish at all. In any of these cases, the client will be required to submit her manuscript to at least four different book reviewers to receive constructive feedback on her work. As in approach one, one of the main tangible outcomes of this approach is that our client will be or will be on her way to becoming a published author, writer, and, perhaps, a novelist.
Three
*Due to the intensive nature of this approach, sessions will be required to be 90 minutes each.This curriculum will be focused entirely on critical and factual essay writing. The client will be given five straight days each week to compile research and evidence on two different essay topics, which the consultant will provide. For instance, one topic may be political in nature and the other historical, or one topic may be scientific and the other philosophical, cultural, or literary. Each of the remaining two days, the consultant and client will meet in session to discuss, develop a position or thesis, outline, and write an essay on one of the two topics assigned that particular week. In the case that the client is having difficulty with forming a thesis, she will move on to outlining and writing the essay, coming back later to form the thesis based on how she wrote the essay. The client must have compiled enough research and evidence to facilitate discussing, outlining, and writing for the full duration of the session. This is particularly important, because as noted by the asterisk below, these sessions will be no shorter than ninety minutes. In the case that the client finds a particular essay topic outstandingly interesting and engaging, she will focus on only that particular topic for the week, after which one session will be spent discussing and outlining the essay, and the following session will be spent writing the essay. Accordingly, the client must have compiled enough research and evidence over the week to facilitate discussing, outlining, and writing upon the topic over two full ninety minute sessions. Due to the intensive nature of research and preparation on and for the essay topic(s), the client will be assigned no other homework for the week. The goal of this curriculum is to stay sharply focused on facilitating meaningful, effective dialogue and developing and writing thorough, comprehensive essays on topics of relevance to society.While the novel form can certainly be an emotionally powerful and passionate medium to express important cultural, philosophical, and political ideas, it flirts with the danger of losing objectivity when deliberating and manifesting those ideas in the realm of non-fictional, everyday reality. Interestingly, the novel has become such a catchy, seductive form of reading and entertainment that even non-fictional mediums fall upon the slippery surface conjured by the novel’s thrilling fantasies: several autobiographical pieces of literature are almost written in story and fictional form to dramatize the events and memoirs of the narrator’s life, science fiction often gets confused for factual science, and political issues take on the popular if not always well-informed sentiment of the public. Thus, this curriculum provides a step away from the crazy, often insane noise generated by the world of raging, unbounded fantasy and messy, sloppy creativity. In fact, one of the main ideas this curriculum seeks to proffer to the client is that creativity and creative thinking are most effectively utilized in service of embellishing upon the vocabulary, grammar, sentence creation, and thesis of a critical, objective, and factually motivated essay. If beauty truly does lie in the calm, silent waters of truth, then there is no better expression of this aphorism than the essay, evidenced by the profound and inspirational writings of essayists like Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and in the modern day, bell hooks, Edward Said, and Cedric Robinson.
Four
This curriculum is for those that want a much lighter and relaxed approach to building their writing skills. The homework will always be simply one essay per week, and the time in class will be used to talk, laugh, play, and smile. This curriculum is all about connecting with the other. We will meet once a week for one hour for twenty weeks or for the duration of the course. I have a feeling this curriculum may become popular amongst a laid-back millennial crowd!