Writing & Humanities Tutoring for Students

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

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.

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.

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 8 years old, while our oldest are adult professionals; we tutor elementary, middle, and high schoolers, as well as college undergraduates and university graduate students.

The Gilliam Writers Group’s services are primarily virtual; although working with an in-person writing tutor near you can be rewarding, we’ve found that our online writing lessons are just as or even more effective — not despite, but because of their digital format. Meeting on Zoom and Google Docs simultaneously allows us to engage with written text in a uniquely tactile way; on a shared digital document, the writing tutor 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, enabling us to intervene in a student’s output more organically than we could in a physical setting.

Our writing tutors online can mark up a student’s work with them live on video, demystifying editorial techniques by providing clear visual break-downs of how they improve a given section of text. We can observe their writing process in real time and provide actionable pointers on technique. We can instantly demonstrate the writing skills we want them to learn — all without the awkwardness of peering over each other’s shoulders or passing notebooks back and forth.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 a “module-style” lesson, we will 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, where necessary. In this way, we guide 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 interrogate complex information and concepts, developing lasting 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.

For those seeking instruction in subjects not compatible with our 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 here 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.

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 if you’re interested in co-creating your own academic writing course online.