Christina Caputo

My Education & Experience

I am a San Francisco Bay Area-based English writing teacher who helps kids, teens, and young adults build strong writing foundations and become confident, independent, empowered writers who are well prepared for high school, college, and career-related writing.

  • BACKGROUND

    My love for communication and business writing began to blossom in two upper-division English composition courses that I took while completing my undergraduate work at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Those two specialized writing courses, Media and Communications Writing and Business Writing, have remained at the forefront of my mind and inspire me daily.

    EDUCATION

    After graduating with honors from UCLA, earning a degree of Bachelor of Arts with a major in Psychology, a minor in Italian, and a specialization in Business and Administration, I completed a two-year-long Multiple Subject Teaching Credential Program with English Learner Authorization at California State University, Sacramento, just a few miles from the California Department of Education, with an overall 4.0 GPA.

    EXPERIENCE

    Eventually in 2014, after obtaining hands-on experience in the educational field, I decided to use my expertise to start my writing business, Words, LLC. creating and developing it has been an organic process. The business has bloomed and evolved over the past 12 years to meet my clients’ varying needs and continues to do so. Current services include personalized English writing assessments, classes, and programs for kids and teens and editing and grammar classes, business writing coaching, and LinkedIn profile writing services for young adults.   

    CONTINUING EDUCATION

    Because I am a lifelong learner, in addition to teaching writing classes and providing writing consulting services full-time, I have been taking writing-related courses through the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). I am also an active member of the Association of Educational Therapists (AET) and Marin Educators in Private Practice (MEPP).

    ALL IN ALL

    All in all, I have a love for writing, and it radiates from my work.

    Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me to discuss how I could help your son or daughter with their writing needs or you with yours; I would love to hear from you!

    ~ Christina Caputo

2 Writing courses that shifted my Career Trajectory

As my dad has been preparing to retire, and my son has been preparing to apply to colleges, I have been doing a lot of contemplating about the progression of life between high school and retirement and how there can be unexpected experiences along the way that shift our trajectory toward an unforeseen career.

During high school and my first three years of undergraduate work at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), I had no …

  • . . . inkling that I would be teaching English or enrolled in advanced copyediting coursework postcollege because, at the time, English was one of my least favorite subjects.

    All of my high school and college English classes revolved around reading fiction books and writing literary analyses about them, and I never saw how either task pertained to the “real” world. Thus, I was convinced I would only take English classes to fulfill high school and college general education requirements.

    It wasn’t until my senior year at UCLA that my perception of English began to shift. It was then that I was required to take two upper-division English composition courses for my Business and Administration Specialization: Media and Communications Writing and Business Writing. Those courses exposed me to a new facet of English—one with a real-world focus—and allowed my unforeseen love for communication and business writing to blossom, making me question if math and science were still my long suit or if it might be English instead.

    After I completed the courses, they surprisingly remained at the forefront of my mind while I worked in fields unrelated to writing. Eventually, a decade and a half later, the classes lured me back to writing, and I started my writing business, Words, LLC.

    Recently, I have been wondering if I would be the founder and owner of a writing business if I hadn’t been required to take the Media and Communications Writing and Business Writing courses.

    Unfortunately, I will never know the answer to that question, but what I do know is that I have a genuine love for writing that radiates from my work, whether I am helping kids and teens build strong writing foundations or helping high schoolers create LinkedIn profiles and write college admission essays that will set them apart from other students, and I don’t think that love would have developed if it wasn’t for the English composition courses I took at UCLA; they have been a beacon of inspiration, guiding me to where I am now—in the right place, pursuing a career in writing.

    ~ Christina Caputo

My Mission

With a “big” move on the horizon at the end of 2024 and the mindset that less is more, I dedicated a good portion of 2024 to paring down and organizing my belongings. During that process, I came across the personal statement that I wrote around the fall of 2004 for my Multiple Subject Teaching Credential Program application, “Item #16” in my application.

My first thought when I saw the paper was, “What were my writing skills like 20 …

  • . . . years ago?” With hesitation and a mixture of curiosity and fear, I picked up the document, and while I mentally prepared myself to read it, I reminded myself that when I wrote the paper I wasn’t fortunate to have the grammar and editing knowledge that I have today and, thus, my writing skills were inferior to what they are today.

    As I began reading through the two-page double-spaced paper, with my imaginary red pen in hand and the same watchful eyes that I read my students’ papers with, I quickly noticed that the paper was sprinkled with grammatical sentence structure errors and punctuation errors, primarily comma ones.

    To this day, it baffles me that I somehow made it all the way through college without receiving grammar or editing instruction in my English classes. That absence of instruction forced me to write based on how words and punctuation marks looked in my writing—not based on where rules said they should go—always leaving me wondering if my writing had been properly written and, in turn, creating an ongoing sense of helplessness.

    It was that constant wondering that finally made me become dedicated, in approximately 2010 and onward, to learning as much as I could about writing so that I could feel confident and empowered when writing instead of unsure and weak.

    Once my writing expertise began to blossom, I then, in 2014, became dedicated to sharing that expertise with elementary through high school students so that they could enter the “real world” as confident and empowered writers who don’t have to indefinitely waste time running everything they write through writing assistant apps—apps that regularly provide inaccurate recommendations—or indefinitely rely on someone or something to write for them.

    My mission to share my writing expertise with elementary through high school students was derived from the lack of writing expertise that was shared with me when I was in elementary through high school, and it has been a steadfast mission ever since, helping hundreds of kids and teens become the writers that others aspire to be.

    Recently, my mission has expanded to include sharing my writing expertise with adults (in my Write with Confidence bimonthly writing lesson series on LinkedIn) so that they too can become the writers that others aspire to be.

    ~ Christina Caputo

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