Teacher-founded. Texas-built. Designed to coach writing, not to write it for students.
Brittaney McKay started her teaching career in Texas as a seventh-grade ELA teacher, back when the state writing test was a two-day exam: three essays, a revising-and-editing section, and a separate reading test, all in forty-five-minute periods, with 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 years, then deliberately stepped into an elementary classroom to see how the foundation was being built, and later taught English I and II. From there she moved into district curriculum administration: writing curriculum, running professional development, and building benchmark testing for an entire grade level. What she loved most in that role wasn’t the office work; it was the campus visits: sitting in on team meetings, planning lessons one-on-one with new teachers, and watching what actually worked versus what only looked good on paper.
That is where WRITE it! comes from. Across all of those grade levels, she kept seeing the same thing: strong students earning zeros on STAAR not because they couldn’t write, but because no one had explicitly taught them how to read for a job, analyze what the prompt was really asking, and check their own essay before submitting. They were being taught what to write. What they needed was to be shown how to think through the writing.
After years of teachers across Texas asking for her materials, Brittaney launched In Between the Lattes, LLC to make them available at scale. The name is a nod to the reality of teacher life: the work that happens between the coffee and the chaos. She holds a master’s in curriculum and instruction, and the mission is simple: put classroom-tested, TEKS-aligned resources in the hands of teachers who need them.
Almost all of the distance between an essay that earns a zero and one that earns a five comes back to three things students were never taught explicitly. WRITE it! teaches those three, one move at a time.
Most platforms jump in once a student is already drafting. WRITE it! coaches the work before the draft, where the score is actually decided, the way a great writing teacher would.
Set a Pay-Attention-To list before reading. Highlight by skill. Notice what the author did on purpose.
Find the actual prompt, name the genre, highlight every keyword, define each one, turn it into a question.
Before submit, check that every paragraph addresses the prompt, and catch the off-prompt drift in time to fix it.
A musician practices the part of the song that’s difficult, over and over. They don’t play the whole concerto on repeat; they isolate the hard bar and drill it until it’s automatic, then put it back in. Writing is the same. Most platforms hand students more prompts and more essays; WRITE it! lets teachers zoom in: practice prompt analysis on twenty prompts in a row without writing a full essay, drill thesis statements until students can write one cold, then put the skill back into the full ECR.
The tool never writes the sentence for the student, never autocompletes, and never improves their draft for them. Instead it asks: 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, and the coaching log shows the teacher exactly which nudges helped each student and which ones didn’t.
WRITE it! isn’t a generic writing tool repackaged for Texas. Every coaching move maps to the TEA STAAR Writing Rubric and the TEKS for Reading Language Arts, grades 3 through English II.
WRITE it!’s coaching framework comes from Done with Zeroes: The Nonnegotiables of ECR Writing, Brittaney’s professional-development training delivered to RLA teachers in districts across Texas. It breaks down hundreds of real STAAR ECRs that earned zeros, not because students couldn’t write, but because of specific, fixable patterns, and turns each pattern into a coaching move the tool can recognize and prompt for.
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 beside them. And because the point is the process, not the platform, every assignment exports to a print-ready workbook: hand kids a packet, do it on paper, and the coaching framework still holds.
A writing test doesn’t only measure whether students can write; it measures whether they understood what they read and what the prompt was asking, under time pressure, on a screen. WRITE it!™ gives every student the same deliberate process, keeps the thinking theirs, and hands teachers data that explains why an essay is drifting off-prompt, in time to fix it. Better writers for students; better information for the people teaching them.