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INTRODUCTION
Huntington Leaning Center is an educational service center in the United States based in Oradell,
New Jersey. It has been providing its services since 1977. Offering tutoring services has become
more of a need as lessons change from what parents were taught in their time at school.
Huntingtons Why Huntington section of its website offers this service to parents who believe
that their children require assistance with their education. It does this by using a mix of second-
person you and first-person we pronouns. Because of its audience, the webpage is meant to
appeal to parents, as they are the ones who can pay for the assistance that their child needs. It
must do so, however, while making the parent feel that Huntington has the ability to give the
assistance that a child may need without making the parent or child insulted. The Why
Huntington section of this page is divided into four sub-sections: What Parents are Saying,
Proven Results, Certification and Accreditation, and History of Success.

WHAT PARENTS ARE SAYING

Since the Huntington Learning Center webpage is meant to appeal to parents, this sub-section
uses photographs of parents next to a quote from that parent speaking highly of the companys
services. On the surface, this is a good way to make parents feel at ease in choosing Huntington
to assist their children in their educations. Seeing that other parents approve of Huntingtons
services is meant to ensure readers that the pages target audience already enjoys the methods
and services of Huntington. There is a quote accompanied by a smiling parent for four categories
of attributes that Huntington considers important parts of their program: Confidence,
Motivation, Better Grades, and Higher Test Scores. Two of these categories are personality
traits (confidence and motivation) while the other two are the products of tutoring, showing that
Huntingtons services do more than just help students increase their grades.
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Each quote is also accompanied by a phrase from Huntington such as, Building your childs
confidence through discovering I can! for the Confidence tab. This serves as a reminder for
parents reading the page that these quotes are to show the organizations goals. The fact that each
tab is its own clickable piece of the page serves to show parents that each tab is a separate goal
that Huntington works toward and that each is equally important, shown by the quotes taking up
the same amount of space when clicked. The only problem with the quotes is that while three of
them relate directly to the tab that they fall under, the quote for the Motivation tab does not
reassure parents that Huntington will help their child build motivation. Instead, it is another
example of the program building a childs confidence, making one quote redundant. It would
have been much better if a quote showing childs willingness to learn had been used. This would
work if the quote were something similar to, My son has gone from hating his homework to
making it his #1 priority!

Another thing that could have helped this section keep its goal of relatability with parents would
have been to use different pictures. The pictures used look like professional headshots of one
parent each that, based on the quotes, are parts of two-parent homes. This takes away from the
concept of relatability that the rest of the sub-section enforces. The pictures would complement
the quotes if they seemed more realistic or involved the children mentioned. Pictures of the
parents with their children would have added value to the quotes more than the current pictures,
which can come across as forced.

PROVEN RESULTS
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This sub-section has a large header to introduce readers to its main idea. This heading gets its
point across well, using a question and response to indicate that Huntington knows that it is its
job to convince parents that they know what they are doing. It does this by indicating that their
success is proven and that parents can trust the organization . Trust is an emotionally
charged word, showing that the organization has very good responses to its program. Despite its
successes, the header of this sub-section has one major downfall. It uses too many different
colors, even using two separate colors in one sentence. It would be much less distracting if there
were only two colors used for this part of the sub-section; one for the question and one for the
response. A third color is not necessary for the smaller phrase involving trust because that phrase
can be removed completely since the sentence before it shares the same idea.

The paragraph in this sub-section does not, however, share the same idea as the header. The
paragraph successfully uses second-person language to make readers imagine the scenarios of
triumph that it mentions. It also uses one we to assure parents that Huntington shares the same
values as they have. This paragraph does not, however, relate to the header by showing any sign
of proven success except for the mention of being running for almost 40 years at the end,
indicating some level of success. Besides this, the paragraph does not show any signs of
Huntingtons proven success, which is supposed to be the main idea of this sub-section according
to the header.

The boxes under this paragraph attempt to do the opposite. Each box presents something that
Huntington has helped children improve scores in. The use of different colors here is much more
appropriate than in the header. Different colors are used to specify the subject or test that students
improved on, so that readers can easily see that the 2+ grade levels growth was specifically in
the subjects of reading and math. It also helps that the tests are identified as separated from the
point increases because it shows the specific difference in point increases between the difference.
The negative part of this, though, is that there is no scale to indicate how impressive these
improvements are. These number improvements are significant in their respective boxes, but
there is nothing to show that to readers. Two letter grades is a two-fifths improvement and four
points on the ACT could be the difference between being offered college scholarships and not, as
the maximum score is only a 36. Without these indicators, some readers may see the boxes and
wonder why Huntington only helps students improve by four points on one test and 200 points
on the other.

Another negative part of this sub-section is the purple/pink box attached to the score
improvement boxes. It is good that it provides contact information for those that may be curious
and it makes an attempt at being positive but its word choice can seem negative. The phrase,
Your child can be one our success stories! seems selfish. Because it uses our, it seems like
the idea is that the children would be used for Huntingtons benefit instead of vice versa. A better
replacement would be, Your child can write their own success story!
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CERITICATION AND ACCREDITATION

The header to this sub-section suffers from the same problem as the previous header. It conveys
the idea of what this section should be about but it is too distracting because it uses three
different colors and the last phrase seems unnecessary. The paragraph in this subsection is more
to the point than the previous one. This paragraph focuses well on one thing (accreditation)
and assures parents that Huntington knows what it is doing. Because of this, though, it is quickly
revealed that the header once again does not have much to do with the rest of the sub-section.
The ideas are related to getting a great report card but only loosely. The header would have been
much better off making the main idea out to be accreditation. This could possibly decrease trust
in the credibility of the organization as it has made this same mistake twice. The word trust is
also used several times in the paragraph, accompanying this idea and reminding readers of the
positive emotions that were induced by the use of the word earlier in the webpage.

This effect is reduced, however, by the use of the second-person language early in the paragraph.
It tells parents something that they would not do and what they want, which can come off as
forceful and arrogant. Instead of saying, you want to be able to trust that your students tutors
know what they are doing the paragraph could say, we want you to be able to trust that
our tutors know what they are doing To increase that trust and reinforce the main idea of the
sub-section there is a box explaining accreditation. This is good as not everyone reading this
page is likely to know what the term means and this gives them an idea, additionally giving
Huntington more credibility. The box also gives a simplified explanation of what it means that
Huntington is accredited so that even if readers got overwhelmed by the previous explanation,
they still understand.
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HISTORY OF SUCCESS

This subsection does the same with colors as the previous sub-sections do with their headers.
Contrary to the others, the phrase under the header here adds to the header, giving an idea of how
long Huntington has been successful. The paragraph for this sub-section also directly relates to
the header, unlike the previous paragraphs. This paragraph gives the mission of the organization
in a way that incorporates it smoothly, but it would do much better to place the mission at the top
of the page. At this point, it is much too late to be introducing the mission because readers have
had plenty of time to make their own assumptions.

Despite the fact that the paragraph and header in this sub-section are related to each other much
better than previously shown, this sub-section seems to be in existence more for its neat factor
than anything else. There is a clickable timeline in the section, but it only gives vague facts. For
example, it begins with Refining Huntingtons 4-step approach but mentions nothing about
how it was revised or the actual 4-step approach itself. The timeline also begins automatically set
to the year 1981 even though the user may make it go all the way back to the beginning of the
organization in 1977. The inclusion of this timeline may seem neat but it only takes away from
the credibility of the rest of the page by not elaborating on anything it introduces. It would help
the page to add more description or even to remove the timeline altogether.
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Conclusion
Overall, this webpage does its job fairly well. There are many errors that would vastly improve
the message but nothing that completely invalidates the message that Huntington is attempting to
convey. Writers could use this page to see how easy it is to write ideas that do not connect, such
as the headers on the webpage, and remember to ensure that what they write stays connected and
focused. The webpage also uses second-person language well to keep readers directly involved.
The mix of you and we is used well in this webpage to maintain a connection between the
audience and the organization. Writers could use this webpage as a decent example of
maintaining ethos.