Native Society interview with Erica Meltzer

The Native Society, an online platform for innovation and entrepreneurship, recently interviewed me about my experience founding The Critical Reader as part of its NativeAdvice series. From the interview: How did you get into the industry? In 2008, I was tutoring a student for the Writing section of the SAT. I didn’t want her to use up all the questions in the Official Guide, and so I went to the bookstore looking for additional practice material. I looked through the standard offerings and was pretty shocked at how poorly they reflected the actual test. I’d already written practice questions for a bunch of independent companies, but until then, it had never occurred to me that I could write my own materials. But as I looked through the guides on the shelves, I thought, â€Å"I can do so much better than this.† So basically, I just started compiling sentences and creating SAT-style errors in them for my student. She was severely dyslexic, but she ended up scoring a 750 on the Writing section (which was much better than even her parents expected!), and so I realized I was on to something. I started developing exercises more systematically and writing up my explanations as well. At first, it was just with the intention of giving them to my students, but everyone did so well and so consistently, that it eventually occurred to me that I could turn my worksheets into an actual book. That’s how The Ultimate Guide to SAT Grammar was born. Click here to read the whole thing.