Writing & Humanities Tutoring for Students

Our private online writing lessons spark curiosity, sharpen the mind, and reinforce technique. Find a qualified academic writing tutor today.

 
 

humanities research & writing skills - english language arts - formal essays & papers - literary analysis - basic & advanced grammar - critical thinking skills - elementary writing tutors - middle school writing tutors - high school writing tutors - college writing tutors

 
  • <autoplay speed=5></autoplay>Have you noticed that...

    students today aren’t learning how to write?

  • why it's a problem

    Unfortunately for those students, written communication is the single most valuable skill in the internet era. The more we do online, the more we have to write; writing is increasingly central to our interactions.

    Writing is also crucial for success in every academic discipline — even the STEM fields! Of course, writing is especially important for the subjects we teach at the Gilliam Writers Group: the humanities. The term “humanities” encompasses a wide variety of disciplines including English Language Arts, History, Social Studies, the Social Sciences, Philosophy, Classics, and more.

  • educational implications

    Consider that writing is the first step toward everything else in our society. We write to set ideas in motion by sharing them; we write to compile data & interpret patterns; we even write to pre-plan other communication through forms of media like audio & video. Today, nothing is considered official until it’s written down & stored in a network. It follows that 21st-century students should receive intensive training in writing throughout their educations. But they don’t.

  • 1st cause

    Despite writing’s obvious importance, few schools act to improve their writing instruction programs when confronted with mediocre results. Even fewer schools seem able to identify these mediocre results when they surface. Often, writing & humanities teachers face the same lack of training that impedes their students.

  • 2nd cause

    Nonetheless, those rare teachers who can provide consistent, well-developed feedback on their students’ writing projects often encounter yet another barrier to communicating this feedback effectively. America’s standard classroom learning model precludes the required quality of instruction (individual, long-term, & detail-focused) that every novice needs in order to learn a craft well. In the Middle Ages, apprentices gained mastery of crafts through frequent, direct instruction and real-time intervention from “masters”. Today, they learn in socially indirect group environments geared toward passive absorption of theoretical knowledge. A classroom is no place—or at least, it’s an insufficient place—to learn writing skills.

  • consequences

    As a result, most students today cannot write a logically structured paragraph. Many also struggle to read, having never quite learned how to organize & interpret the increasingly vast quantities of information they consume on a daily basis. This means that even their A+ essays often lack the intellectual consistency that stems from genuine understanding of texts.

  • our solution

    The Gilliam Writers Group offers you the literary training students currently lack, delivered with the convenience & efficiency of virtual learning. Over time, our online writing tutors work to restructure students’ thinking habits, ironing out mental pathways jumbled by years of ineffectual reading & writing. We teach the craft of writing along with supportive techniques for information processing and reading comprehension.

  • writing tutoring methods

    How? Through custom writing courses online, we train our students simultaneously in writing mechanics (grammar, style, vocabulary, phonics if necessary) & formal academic analysis, encouraging skill repetition to the point of mastery. To keep them engaged during this process, we encourage them to research & write about topics they find compelling. In this way, our students learn to use writing as a tool for sharpening the clarity, logic, & nuance of their own internal perceptions.

  • reach out, or read on

    To schedule a free consultation call with a representative from the Gilliam Writers Group leadership team, click here.

    To learn more about our teaching methods, our writing tutors’ backgrounds, and our educational philosophy, just scroll down!

    If you’re ready to help your student get more from their academic experience than ever before, consider hiring a tutor for writing skills through the Gilliam Writers Group today.

 

Find a writing tutor online with training you can trust. Our faculty members hold graduate degrees in writing and literature from the world's top MFA and PhD programs.

The Gilliam Writers Group is a small cohort of skilled writers who love to teach. We offer online writing tutoring for every humanities subject (history, the social sciences, philosophy, etc.), specializing in English literature and language arts. We also tutor students who want to improve their writing in the S.T.E.M. fields. Week by week, our students enjoy custom-designed academic writing lessons designed with their needs in mind. Whether we’re building lessons around specific school assignments or creating them from scratch, we are committed to delivering rigorous, high-quality (and fun!) learning experiences to everyone we work with.

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Our tutoring faculty, composed of experienced literary professionals and distinguished graduates from leading programs in our field, are not just writing experts; we are students of educational theory. As writing tutors online, we work continually to improve our teaching skills for the digital environment, developing philosophically grounded, research-supported pedagogical strategies that address the nuances of language, thought, and composition in cyberspace.
We view the Gilliam Writers Group as a necessary response to concerning trends in youth literacy and general education in America today; our company represents what we hope will become a paradigm shift in the way reading and writing are taught, and valued, in this country. Schools increasingly neglect to teach their students the essential building blocks of language. For us, however, these foundational tools are essential. We believe that writing education should incorporate systematic training in grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, while also extending beyond technical proficiency to help learners cultivate analytical acumen and a distinctive narrative voice.
Our services are available anywhere there’s internet; no matter where you live, you can find a writing tutor with the Gilliam Writers Group. Many of our students and faculty members are based in metropolitan centers including New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and London.
 
 

Reading tutors & reading comprehension tutors

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Academic writing tutors & essay tutors

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History tutors

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Social Studies tutors / Social Sciences tutors

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English Language Arts (ELA) tutors

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Reading tutors & reading comprehension tutors 〰️ Academic writing tutors & essay tutors 〰️ History tutors 〰️ Social Studies tutors / Social Sciences tutors 〰️ English Language Arts (ELA) tutors 〰️

 

Philosophy tutors (including IB Theory Of Knowledge)

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Creative writing tutors (fiction, nonfiction, & poetry)

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Elementary school writing & humanities tutors

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Middle school writing & humanities tutors

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Philosophy tutors (including IB Theory Of Knowledge) 〰️ Creative writing tutors (fiction, nonfiction, & poetry) 〰️ Elementary school writing & humanities tutors 〰️ Middle school writing & humanities tutors 〰️

 

High school writing & humanities tutors

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AP tutors (Advanced Placement)

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IB tutors (International Baccalaureate)

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College writing & humanities tutors

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Graduate-level writing & humanities tutors

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High school writing & humanities tutors 〰️ AP tutors (Advanced Placement) 〰️ IB tutors (International Baccalaureate) 〰️ College writing & humanities tutors 〰️ Graduate-level writing & humanities tutors 〰️

 

We offer professional writing help to students of all academic backgrounds and grade levels, from elementary school to college and beyond.

Across academic disciplines and age groups, GWG emphasizes writing and letters as the focus of our instruction. Every online writing tutor on our faculty has worked with students of diverse ages, interests, educational backgrounds, and skill levels. Our youngest students are eight years old, while our oldest are adult learners; we tutor elementary, middle, and high schoolers, as well as college undergraduates and university graduate students.

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As mentioned above, the Gilliam Writers Group’s services are primarily virtual; though working with a writing tutor near you can be rewarding, we’ve found that our online writing lessons provide an equally (or even more) effective learning experience — not despite, but because of their digital format. Meeting on Zoom and Google Docs allows us to engage with written text in uniquely organic, cooperative ways; by collaborating on cloud-based documents, our writing tutors can shift seamlessly between dialogue and demonstration, idea and experiment, critique and revision. The virtual environment introduces an unprecedented level of immediacy into the teaching process, making it possible to intervene in our students’ output far more naturally than we could in a physical setting.
The upshot is that our writing tutors online can mark up each student’s work with them, rather than delivering feedback asynchronously. We can observe their writing process unfolding in real time and provide actionable pointers on technique. We can instantly demonstrate the writing, research, and thinking skills we want them to learn — all without the awkwardness of peering over each other’s shoulders or passing notebooks back and forth.
 
  • “Our schools now often teach little of an essential and once common knowledge, the vocabulary of grammar—the techspeak of language and writing. Words such as subject, predicate, object, or adjective and adverb, or past tense and past-perfect tense, are half understood by or wholly unfamiliar to many. Yet they’re the names of the writer’s tools. They’re the words you need when you want to say what’s wrong or right in a sentence. A writer who doesn’t know them is like a carpenter who doesn’t know a hammer from a screwdriver.”

    Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft

Pedagogical Foundations

 

Our tutors restructure students' reading and writing habits, improving academic performance and paving the way for continued growth.

Gilliam Writers Group tutors avoid one-size-fits-all approaches. Our pedagogy takes inspiration from the Socratic method of teaching as well as the educational approach known as “organic learning,” which views learning as an evolving process rooted in the individual's context and interests. On a practical level, this means our online writing lessons tend to be minimal, open-ended, and fueled by critical thought. Each new lesson emerges naturally from the one before it, so that no two students follow the same exact path in their studies. The fact that our lessons are personalized, however, does not mean they lack rigor.

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Our writing tutors use Socratic questioning as a pedagogical tool to stimulate critical thought, challenging students to pay attention to the assumptions implicit in their own thought processes as they progress toward, and through, intellectual maturity. Through this and other methods, we sharpen their analytical skills while nurturing their capacity for independent reasoning, fostering a keen sense for the structure of arguments. In other words, when you hire a Gilliam faculty member, you’re not just getting a tutor for writing. You’re getting a tutor for thinking.
Our writing instructors also draw heavily on the University of Oxford’s tutorial model, which calls for focused intellectual engagement between one student and one teacher. Oxford-style “tutorials” (lessons) take an inquiry-based, dialogical approach to learning, offering an educational experience structured around questions rather than prescriptive answers. At Gilliam, we appreciate how this model forces the student to share initiative with their writing tutor in directing their own learning process, even when the subject may seem technical and lifeless (like grammar). This encourages students to develop their own unique set of academic interests, so that they can cultivate a genuine relationship to a particular discipline or body of work.
Overall, Gilliam writing tutors focus on the least tangible, but most valuable, aspects of our students’ learning — on cultivating mental habits that clarify thought and communication; on building the intellectual foundations for meaningful engagement with literature and other media; on instilling a stronger comprehension of the structures underlying this language we share and love. By adapting our pedagogy to meet the needs of each individual student, we aim to impart a lifelong passion for effective communication and intellectual growth. This prepares our students not only for academic and professional success, but to engage with their everyday lives in more fulfilling, more authentic ways.
 
  • “This willingness continually to revise one’s own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky. The arts and sciences, like Plato’s dialogues, have at their center the drive to confer greater clarity on what already has clear discernibility, as well as to confer initial clarity on what originally has none…By perpetuating beauty, institutions of education help incite the will toward continual creation.”

    Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

A Holistic Approach

 

Thinking skills and writing skills go hand-in-hand. We see our students as whole individuals with inner lives deserving of educators’ attention.

Working with a professional writing tutor online can have lasting benefits beyond the Zoom room, and even beyond academic achievement — which is not, after all, an end in itself. Ultimately, the Gilliam Writers Group aims to produce not only excellent writers, but incisive thinkers and informed citizens: well-rounded people capable of articulating nuanced ideas with precision, originality, and depth. Accordingly, we work to establish mutually enriching connections with our students — long-term collaborations that transcend conventional teacher-student dynamics.

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Over time, we have found that this holistic approach to writing tutoring leads to significant improvements in our students’ confidence, both in and outside the classroom – probably because it gives them the intellectual skills to back said confidence up. Our methods really work, and that’s why they’re so central to our practice across all levels of writing education. Whether you’re hiring an elementary writing tutor to teach the fundamentals of sentence structure, a middle school writing tutor to foster basic argumentative skills, a high school writing tutor to model more advanced essays, or a college writing tutor to facilitate in-depth literary analysis, the core elements of our teaching style will remain consistent.
Our elementary writing tutors create a foundation of confidence and joy in writing, making language into an adventure while teaching basic reading comprehension, vocabulary, and grammar. Our middle school writing tutors shift toward nurturing critical thinking and basic research skills, bridging the gap between creativity and the (often less fun) rigors of well-structured writing. In high school, we narrow our focus, becoming essay writing tutors and English literature tutors. We aim to help our students articulate nuanced ideas and develop logically consistent arguments in their coursework. Our university-level students benefit from an even more specialized approach; Gilliam’s dedicated college writing tutors provide guidance in high-level academic writing, advanced research methodologies, and theoretical criticism. This progression ensures a cohesive yet flexible educational journey for each student in our company.
Our writing tutors are also adept at integrating literary analysis and other advanced techniques with more instruction in more foundational subjects like spelling, grammar, reading comprehension, etc. This allows us to effectively support older students whose schooling has failed to help them master the basic rules and patterns of English expression. By analyzing great works of literature in concert with their more “remedial” studies, these students can gain a broader perspective within the humanities while they improve the technical aspects of their writing.
Our writing tutoring services are designed to ensure that everyone who works with us is not only learning to write well, but also becoming a thoughtful reader and interpreter of texts.
 
  • “He who lets the world…choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision…Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”

    John Stuart Mill, On Liberty & the Subjection of Women

 

Our private online writing lessons are minimal, open-ended, and fueled by critical thought.

The Gilliam Writers Group favors inquiry-based, dialogical lesson structures that encourage the learner to take an active role in their own learning process, sparking self-directed exploration. Accordingly, when our students don’t have to focus on schoolwork or other pressing assignments, we often structure their writing lessons around two-part “modules” – meetings in which the student spends half their time reading, annotating, and discussing a text (or pair of texts) under the guidance of their instructor, and the other half drafting responses to a series of analytical prompts about the material under study.

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To make the most of each hour, the texts our tutors choose are generally brief; poems, articles and short stories are popular choices. (For grammar-focused courses of study, we rely on a curated selection of tried-and-tested workbooks and textbooks, along with relevant excerpts from works of literature or relevant articles for applied analysis.) None of our students follow the exact same series of texts; each writing tutor designs their lessons from scratch to match the capacities, interests, and learning history of a given pupil.
After the focused writing period at the heart of our “module-style” lessons, we generally ask students to read their initial responses out loud. We then prompt them to clarify and deepen their arguments, providing thorough editorial feedback, including mini-lessons on spelling and grammar when necessary. In this way, GWG’s online writing tutors guide our students to develop critical thinking and writing skills that support their long-term academic development.
On the whole, our teaching methodology balances individual responsiveness with structural continuity. Each writing tutoring session we facilitate becomes a collaborative exploration of literary and analytical craft. At the Gilliam Writers Group, our students are not just completing tasks; they are learning how to analyze, synthesize, and (perhaps most importantly) use complex information and concepts, building permanent mental habits that they — and we — can be proud of.
*Please note that when students bring specific assignments to complete in-session under the guidance of their writing tutor online, those assignments will become the focus of that day’s meeting; any modules or lesson plans the tutor has prepared ahead of time can be set aside for another day.
 
  • “Each of us is born in a corner of the earth and at a particular moment in historic time…But school and university are places apart where a declared learner is emancipated from the limitations of his local circumstances…He finds himself invited to pursue satisfactions he has never yet imagined or wished for. They are, then, sheltered places where excellences may be heard because the din of local partialities is no more than a distant rumble. They are places where a learner is initiated into what there is to be learned.”

    Michael Oakeshott, The Voice of Liberal Learning

Grammar, Literacy & Special Topics

 

Master the fundamentals of language through tailored writing classes online.

For those seeking instruction in subjects not compatible with our open-ended module method, have no fear! Our online writing tutors are more than capable of designing lessons focused exclusively on specific topics like grammar, vocabulary, creative writing (fiction, nonfiction or poetry), advanced ESL/ESOL, and more. Everyone on our faculty can double as a grammar tutor or provide instruction on the elements of style in any academic genre. Let us know what you need, and we’ll tailor our lessons to match; providing effective writing help for students with diverse academic needs is our passion.
Click below to view age-specific lists of the textbooks, workbooks, and style guides we use to supplement our tutoring in grammar and other subjects that require a highly structured approach.

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For clients not interested in week-by-week writing tutoring (without a set end date), we can also design custom online writing courses or programs of predetermined length. This option works well for students with specific, limited, and time-bound goals.
While most tutoring programs offered through the Gilliam Writers Group are one-on-one, as we find that’s the best way to provide educational value in online environments, some of our faculty members may agree to facilitate partner-style writing classes suitable for two students at a time.
We invite you to contact us or schedule a consultation call if you’re interested in co-creating your own academic writing course online.
 
A student speaks with her writing tutor for middle school.

Our online writing tutoring service is best for…

  • Students in elementary, middle, or high school seeking long-term academic mentorship.

  • Students in college or graduate school facing complex academic and organizational demands.

  • Struggling students who need immediate academic support.

  • Gifted students who aren’t sufficiently challenged by their humanities coursework.

  • Advanced speakers of English as a foreign language who want to deepen the sophistication of their syntax, style, and vocabulary.

A student composes an essay for her high school writing tutor.

Academic tutoring costs from $85 to $200 per hour.

To learn more about how we bill for online writing tutoring services, please see our pricing page for students:

A student engages in a lesson with her writing tutor for high school.

Ready for next steps?

Schedule a free 15-minute consultation call with a GWG Enrollment Manager.

 

Need an online writing tutor?

Schedule a free consultation call with a Gilliam Writers Group Enrollment Manager. We’ll help you find a writing tutor in 24 hours or less.

You can book your call directly on our scheduling page by clicking the button below:

 
  • Brady Gilliam, Founder

  • Tadeh Kennedy, Enrollment Manager

  • Misha McDaniel, Enrollment Manager

 

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