Where this came from.
WRITE it! is one of three sister products from In Between the Lattes, LLC — built by a Texas teacher who got tired of watching strong students get zeros on STAAR for reasons nobody had ever taught them how to fix.
Brittaney McKay
Brittaney started her teaching career in Texas as a seventh-grade ELA teacher back when the Texas writing test was a two-day exam: three essays, a revising-and-editing section, and a separate reading test. Forty-five-minute periods. Students who couldn’t always read the passage. She learned to be efficient with time, intentional with practice, and ruthlessly specific about what students actually needed.
She taught middle school for several years, then deliberately stepped into an elementary classroom to see how the foundation was being built. After that came English I and II summer school. Then her district’s curriculum administration role, where she wrote curriculum, ran professional development, and built the benchmark testing for an entire grade level.
What she enjoyed most in that admin role wasn’t the office work — it was the visits. She was teased for never being at her desk because she was always on a campus, sitting in on team meetings, planning lessons one-on-one with new teachers, watching what actually worked in real classrooms versus what looked good on paper.
That’s where the resources started. First as things to share with the teachers asking for help. Then as the foundation for In Between the Lattes, the company she founded to put those classroom-tested resources in the hands of teachers across Texas and beyond. She holds a master’s in curriculum and instruction.
The way a great teacher would actually coach it.
If you boil down the difference between an essay that earns a zero and one that earns a five, almost all of it comes back to three things students don’t know how to do yet. WRITE it! is built around teaching those three things, one move at a time.
The three big things
Most students who struggle on a STAAR ECR aren’t struggling because they can’t write. They’re struggling because one of these three pieces never got taught explicitly. WRITE it! teaches all three:
Read better
Set a Pay-Attention-To list before reading. Highlight by skill. Notice what the author did on purpose.
Analyze the prompt
Find the actual prompt, name the genre, highlight every keyword, define each one, turn it into a question.
Save the essay
Before submit, check that every paragraph actually addresses the prompt. Catch the off-prompt drift in time to fix it.
Practice the skill, not just the full essay
Brittaney’s background in coaching parallels her teaching philosophy. A musician practices the part of the song that’s difficult, over and over. They don’t play through the whole concerto on repeat — they stop, isolate the hard bar, and drill it until it’s automatic. Then they put it back into the piece.
Writing is the same. Most platforms hand students more prompts and more essays. WRITE it! lets teachers zoom in: practice prompt analysis on twenty different prompts in a row without ever writing a full essay. Drill thesis statements until students can write one cold. Then put the skill back into the full ECR.
What “talks back” really means
The tool never writes the sentence for the student. It never autocompletes. It never improves their draft for them. Instead, it asks the question a writing teacher would ask: What did the author do on purpose here? Which prompt keyword is missing from this paragraph? Where in the passage does this come from?
Then it waits. The thinking stays the student’s. The coaching log shows the teacher exactly which nudges helped each student and which ones didn’t.
Designed around the TEA STAAR Rubric.
WRITE it! isn’t a generic writing tool repackaged for Texas. Every coaching move maps directly to the TEA STAAR Writing Rubric and the TEKS for Reading Language Arts, grades 3 through English II.
Built on the “Done with Zeroes” methodology
WRITE it!’s coaching framework comes from Done with Zeroes: The Nonnegotiables of ECR Writing, Brittaney’s professional-development training that’s been delivered to Texas RLA teachers in districts across the state. The training breaks down hundreds of real STAAR ECRs that earned zeros — not because the students couldn’t write, but because of specific, fixable patterns. WRITE it! turns each of those patterns into a coaching move the tool can recognize and prompt for.
Aligned to what Texas actually tests
Tested in real classrooms first
Every piece of the coaching engine was tested with students before it became a feature. The PAT list framework, the keyword-verified thesis, the author’s-purpose word bank, the two-color save-the-essay revising pass — these came out of years of watching what works when you stand next to a student and ask the right question. WRITE it! is what happens when those moves get encoded into software so every student can have a writing coach standing next to them.
Why we still believe in pencil and paper
WRITE it! is built for a digital classroom, but it doesn’t pretend paper is obsolete. Every assignment exports to a print-ready student workbook so teachers can hand kids a packet, do the work on paper, and still get the coaching framework. The point is the process, not the platform.
Want to be first?
WRITE it! launches this summer. Join the waitlist and we’ll let you know the moment it’s ready for your classroom.
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