NoRedInk

NoRedInk operates an online writing education platform for Grades 3-12. The product combines adaptive skill-building exercises (sentence restructuring, text markup, multi-paragraph passage manipulation), lightweight writing prompts, scaffolded essays, guided reviews, and standards-aligned diagnostics. Exercises are personalized using student-supplied interests such as favorite celebrities, characters, friends and pets. Teachers, school administrators and district stakeholders receive diagnostic data, growth reports and gradebooks, and content can be filtered by alignment to state and national standards and tests.

The platform has expanded beyond grammar practice into a broader writing curriculum. Recent additions include an AI-powered Grading Assistant that scores and gives feedback on argumentative and literary analysis essays with more genres being added, Read-Write-Reason integrated reading and writing activities, a Language Support Suite for English learners (single-word translations, simple definitions, translated directions, text-to-speech, EL standards and test prep prompts), ELA resources for Grades 3-5, and Originality Insights, which reports how long students spend writing and flags text pasted from external sources.

The company offers a free, limited version for teachers alongside a paid Premium tier for schools, which unlocks exercises for more than 1,000 skills, hundreds of texts, prompts and lessons, guided practice for 10+ writing genres, teacher/school/district-level reporting, professional development, and integrations with Canvas, Clever and Schoology.

Founding story

NoRedInk was founded by Jeff Scheur, a high school English teacher at Whitney Young Magnet High School in Chicago. Over eight years of teaching he observed that students could not properly understand the mistakes they made on written assignments, so he built a taxonomy of commonly spotted errors accumulated over several years. In his eighth year of teaching he posted an advertisement on Craigslist seeking an engineer to help build an educational platform, and his students voted on the name "NoRedInk."

Business model

Freemium software-as-a-service for schools: a free limited version is available to individual teachers, while NoRedInk Premium is sold to schools and districts for full access to the writing curriculum, guided composition tools, district-level reporting, professional development and LMS integrations. Press coverage notes that thousands of schools request upgrades to the paid version every month.

Paid subscriptions to NoRedInk Premium purchased by schools and districts, upsold from a free teacher tier.

Traction

Reached 15,000 users in the two months after its February 2012 launch; by 2021 press reports described use in more than 60% of US school districts, and the company currently states use in one in two US school districts, with thousands of schools requesting paid upgrades monthly.

Latest developments

The company is rolling out Read-Write-Reason integrated reading and writing activities and an AI-powered Grading Assistant, initially covering argumentative and literary analysis essays with more genres releasing through the back-to-school season. It has also introduced a Language Support Suite for English learners, ELA resources for Grades 3-5, and Originality Insights for academic integrity.