Review: College-Ready Writing Essentials™

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Are you looking for a program to help your students get ready for college level writing? Look no further! BetterRhetor has come out with a college writing course for your high school students. Help your students succeed with College-Ready Writing Essentials™ (CRWE)! 25 lessons to teach your children, your students what is expected of them in a college level assignment. This review is of the full package of CRWE.

College ready writing essentials BetterRhetor

What I am Reviewing

BetterRhetor.
College-Ready Writing Essentials™.
William Bryant, PhD.
I reviewed the full package.
Reviewed for: Homeschool Review Crew
Age: highschool (junior/seniors), graduated highschool, early college.

Writing, college, writing essentials, college readiness, student success, academic writing

You can learn more about Mr. Bryant at his website.

The Details of College-Ready Writing Essentials™

25 lessons are presented to the student in this online writing program. It specifically targets the skill of writing a college level paper. These 25 lessons are divided into five sections.

Overview (one lesson)
Planning (lessons 2-11)
Drafting (lessons 12-19)
Revising (lessons 20-23)
Finalizing (lessons 23-25)

Two additional resources are provided. A PDF of Key Terms, and bonus guide to the culture of college. Using the students knowledge, skills, behaviors, and awareness to form a piece of writing to inform and persuade their readers.

Since my lad has a love of writing research papers I thought this course would be a good fit for him advancing into highschool. He’s just in grade nine so I wasn’t sure if it would be too advanced for him. He likes it so that’s a good thing eh? 🙂

I love that this online course is so nicely laid out. The lesson order provided on the left side of the screen, the made text on the right. Part of me wished there was a video component, but my son wisely pointed out that having it all written down meant he could reread easily instead of having to hunt down the specific portion he didn’t understand.

When it came to doing the lessons, my ninth-grade son said “It wasn’t hard to read, but it also wasn’t extremely easy.” He took his time doing the lessons, I expected one lesson completed each week. In three weeks he easily got four lessons done before heading off to camp.

Easy to read

Sometimes when working on a on-line program it is difficult to maintain your progress. This academic writing program allows you to save your progress, helping you to easily move forward from lesson to lesson.

CRWE is meant to be completed over the course of five weeks. At 25 lessons that would be one lesson daily. Go at the speed of your student. Some may need longer to complete each lesson. My son commented “Younger students will want to read the lesson one day, and then do the assignment the next day. Older students would have no problem doing it all in one day.“

The assignments for each lesson are found at the close of the lesson. These files open as PDF’s that you can either print off or store on your computer.

PDF’s mean options

The advantage of a PDF file is the option to print or not. Your student can easily do all their work in a notebook, or you can print off each worksheet for your student to write directly on it. They are done in black/white making it easy on the printer. Since it’s a PDF there is no time limit on completing the work other than what you arbitrarily set.

CRWE is a self-paced course. It is meant to be done over five weeks but you can easily stretch that out as needed. It is an online program and you are granted life-time access so you can use it with all family members. Their goal is to help your students be better prepared for college level writing, utilizing all their skills in persuasion and information gathering.

Don’t let your students be part of the 75% of young people not prepared for college. Learn more about this gap and how to address it at The Writing Gap. Help them learn the skills necessary to succeed pursuing their dreams. Let them write, and write well in the subjects of their choosing.

Thoughts/Recommendations

I asked my son what he thought of College-Ready Writing Essentials™. “It has a lot of reading and I couldn’t do it as fast as I wanted to. I liked it though and want to finish doing it“.

I loved the responsiveness of customer service. My son does his work on his own laptop and for whatever reason I couldn’t transfer over to him. I wrote and asked customer service what to do and they happily set my son up with his own account. My lad loved this! His own account, mom can’t mess things up by checking future lessons and messing up bookmarks or whatever. It was excellent in his mind, and for me as a parent, it was just the answer I needed.

One of the benefits of the BetterRhetor program is they offer two levels, the full and the premium. I can totally see the advantage of doing this program twice. Once in grades 9/10 doing the full program then doing the premium package in grade 12. Read the reviews, come to your own conclusions. 🙂

Read Other Reviews

Did you know that 31 other members of the crew reviewed BetterRhetor? Some of us reviewed the full package, others the premium. I know you don’t want to miss reading those reviews. You can check them out over at the Homeschool Review Crew Blog.