The first AI tool that teaches your students to think instead of doing it for them.
PKL coaches the reasoning behind student writing. See where every student’s argument breaks before they hand it in.
The Problem
You can’t see how your students are thinking. AI is making the problem worse.
Black box reasoning
A student hands you a five-paragraph essay. You can grade the result, but you can’t tell whether they understood the book, or just relied on AI to understand it for them.
Detection fails
Half your class is using AI. Detection tools don’t catch it: Stanford found that GPT detectors flagged 61% of essays by non-native English speakers as AI-generated. Plenty of developing native writers show the same patterns the detectors mistake for AI. Vanderbilt and Northwestern have pulled these tools entirely.
The coaching you’d give, if you could
Every English teacher knows what good writing instruction looks like: a one-on-one conversation with each student about their thesis, evidence, and interpretive move. You’ve never had the time.
The Solution
PKL diagnoses argument quality, not grammar.
Every other AI writing tool fixes commas or drills sentence structure. PKL is the only one that evaluates whether a student’s claim is a claim at all, whether their evidence supports it, and whether their analysis goes anywhere.
The CEEA framework
Every paragraph is scored on four axes used by the Iowa and Purdue writing programs: Claim, Explanation, Evidence, Application. Not pass/fail. Each axis grades as Vague Claim or Clear Claim, Quote Drop or Integrated Evidence, Surface or Interpretive. You see which move each student is missing.
Process visibility
PKL watches students think through each step: thesis, evidence selection, outline, draft. You can see whether they revised, where they got stuck, what they changed. If a student arrives at a finished essay without ever using the workshop, you know.
Coaching, not grading
PKL never rewrites a student’s work. It diagnoses what’s missing and asks the question that would help them fix it. The student does the writing. You give the grade. PKL does the part you don’t have time for: telling each student what their next move is.
Built around your teaching, not ours
PKL is designed to adapt to the way you teach writing, not the other way around.
Every English teacher has a different approach. Some teach Iowa CEEA. Some teach AP rhetorical analysis. Some have a department rubric they’ve built over fifteen years. PKL meets you where you teach.
Your framework
Pick a preset (Iowa CEEA, with AP Rhetorical support coming) or build your own. Rename any axis to match your vocabulary. If your students learn “topic sentence” instead of “claim,” that’s what PKL calls it too.
Your rubric
Upload the grading rubric you already use. PKL maps its diagnostics to your categories and weights, so what students see matches what you’ll grade them on.
Your exemplars
Upload two or three essays you consider strong student work. PKL calibrates its expectations to your standards, not a generic “good essay.”
PKL doesn’t replace your judgment. It extends it across 30 students at once.
Where the best students go next
Once a student clears the rubric, PKL shows them what real writers do next.
Any good teacher knows: you teach the rules so students can eventually grow beyond them. Once a student has internalized the framework, the next step is craft, and the best way to learn craft is from the great writers. PKL’s corpus includes some of the best writers in the English language but every teacher can customize to add their own favorite writers.
From the pros
Joan Didion — Why I Write
the honest verb, the sentence fragment as restraint, the analogy that crosses the gap
James Baldwin — Notes of a Native Son
holding opposing ideas in tension, the delayed thesis, personal essay as political argument
Toni Morrison — Playing in the Dark
opening a literary essay with a physical metaphor; staking a moral claim in six words
George Orwell — Politics and the English Language
vague language as the enemy of thought; rules that give specific actions, not adjectives
Virginia Woolf — Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights
comparing two texts by stating the sharpest difference as a fact, not as something to "explore"
David Foster Wallace — Quack This Way
clarity, precision, and the tension between being understood and being honest
Norman Maclean — A River Runs Through It
rhythm, restraint, and the sentence as a moral unit
Anton Chekhov — letters to his family
showing instead of telling, the discipline of concrete detail
Benjamin Franklin — The Autobiography
the imitation method: reconstructing a writer's argument from memory, then comparing
And from model student essays
The pros set the ceiling. The next rung up from where a student is now matters just as much. PKL also pulls from model student essays: annotated paragraphs from past student work that show the same craft move at a teenager’s level, with notes on the specific sentence-level choices that made it work. Students see what’s realistic at their level, not only what mastery looks like.
How it works in practice
When a student’s paragraph clears the rubric (clear claim, integrated evidence, genuine analysis), PKL doesn’t just say “good.” It points the student to either a professional writer who handled the same move with more skill, or a model student paragraph showing the move at a level they can plausibly reach next.
Not AI-generated advice. Passages from writers your students should be reading anyway, and annotated paragraphs from peers who pulled the move off well.
See it in action
What a student paragraph looks like through PKL.
Student paragraph: Frankenstein, body 2
“Victor abandons the Creature right after he creates it. The Creature says ‘I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel.’ This shows that Victor is a bad father because he doesn’t take care of his creation. The Creature is sad and wants to be loved but Victor won’t love him.”
PKL Diagnostic
“Victor is a bad father” is a moral judgment, not a literary claim. What is Shelley showing us about creation, responsibility, or abandonment?
The “fallen angel” quote is the right pull and is woven into the sentence. Strong evidence selection.
The student paraphrases the quote but doesn’t analyze why Shelley chose “fallen angel” specifically, a religious image with weight the student is missing.
“The Creature is sad and wants to be loved” restates the obvious. What does Shelley want the reader to feel about Victor here? About themselves?
That used to be 30 hours of your weekend. PKL does it in the time a student finishes the paragraph.
How PKL teaches craft
The student writes the typical version. PKL shows them how a pro handles the same idea.
Every paragraph diagnostic comes paired with a craft note: a short passage from a writer in the corpus who handled the same move with more skill, and a specific way the student can borrow it in their own paragraph.
Student paragraph: Gatsby, body 1
“Gatsby is lonely at his own parties. He stands apart from the crowd and doesn’t really participate. Hundreds of people come every weekend, but he doesn’t really know any of them. This shows that wealth and popularity don’t bring happiness.”
NoteClaim is announced, evidence is paraphrased. The student is telling us the parties are lonely instead of letting the parties show it.
Craft note: how Fitzgerald handles the same idea
You’re paraphrasing the parties to argue Gatsby’s loneliness. Look at how Fitzgerald lets the meaning land in a single sentence:
“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Twenty-two words. He never says “lonely.” The image of moths does it: transient, anonymous, drawn to a light that isn’t theirs. One specific detail carries everything.
What to try
Replace your paraphrase with this direct quote. Then write one sentence on what makes Fitzgerald’s image carry your claim. Let the quote do the heavy lifting.
Real passages from the corpus, attributed to the writer. The student gets a specific writer to imitate and a concrete move to try in the next revision.
What no other tool can do
Prose feedback grounded in Baldwin, Didion, Orwell, Wallace, Maclean, Fitzgerald, and Simon.
Every writing tool on the market gives your students the same generic AI advice. PKL’s prose diagnostic is different: it names what’s working in the student’s sentences, identifies what to sharpen, and shows them how a writer handles the same craft move, with an attributed passage from the corpus, never LLM-generated text.
Diagnose, never rewrite
PKL identifies the specific words making a sentence vague and asks the student what concrete thing those words are hiding. It never suggests replacement sentences. The student does the thinking.
Named writers, real passages
When a student’s sentence needs more specificity, they see how David Simon packs a funeral, a date, and a landscape into two sentences. Not a ChatGPT example. A passage from Homicide, attributed and verified.
Growth you can see
Every paragraph diagnostic tracks eight craft strengths: specificity, image making, rhythm, restraint, refusal of cliché, precise verbs, opening moves, and voice. Students see which strengths they’ve unlocked and which are still to come.
For you, the teacher
You’ll be able to add your own exemplar passages, set your own craft rules, and choose which writers and categories to emphasize per assignment. PKL doesn’t replace your literary taste. It carries it into every student’s paragraph diagnostic.
Your exemplar library, your classroom maxims, your standards, in every diagnostic the student sees.
How it works
Three steps to get a class running. Free for beta teachers.
Create a class. Share the code.
Pick a book, write a prompt, set a due date. Students join with a 6-character class code. Canvas LTI and Google Classroom integration are on the roadmap.
Students write in PKL through a structured workflow.
Reflect → Thesis → Sharpen → Evidence → Outline → Draft. PKL coaches each step. When a student pastes a quote, PKL retrieves the passage from the indexed book and verifies it. No fabrication, no hallucination. Students see paragraph-level diagnostics in real time.
Two of those steps are toggle-able per assignment: Reflect (a non-graded pre-writing prompt that asks students to sit with the text before arguing about it) and Sharpen (a 5-round Socratic dialogue where PKL pushes back on the student’s locked thesis from different angles: power, perspective, plain reading, counterclaim. Generates a writing-scaffolding summary the student uses on Evidence and Outline).
You watch the work as it happens.
Open your class dashboard to see each student’s thesis, revisions, and diagnostic history. Grade in PKL or export the data to your gradebook. The hours you used to spend writing margin comments go back to your weekend.
How PKL is different
Why your existing tools aren’t solving this.
Built for the books you teach
29 indexed novels and plays. Most other AI essay tools have zero.
Every book on this list is fully indexed. When a student pastes a quote, PKL retrieves the passage from the source text and verifies it. No fabricated quotes, no generic literary advice. The AI is grounded in the book the student is actually reading.
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet
Macbeth
Romeo and Juliet
Othello
Frankenstein
Pride and Prejudice
Sense and Sensibility
Emma
Jane Eyre
Wuthering Heights
Great Expectations
A Tale of Two Cities
The Scarlet Letter
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Heart of Darkness
The Awakening
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
The Yellow Wallpaper
Crime and Punishment
Candide
The Odyssey
Beowulf
Ethan Frome
A Doll's House
The Importance of Being Earnest
The Time Machine
Frederick Douglass: Narrative
Don’t see your book? Request it from inside PKL. We prioritize new titles by what beta teachers ask for. Coverage of To Kill a Mockingbird, The Crucible, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1984, Lord of the Flies, Beloved, and The Things They Carried is gated by content licensing. We’re working it.
Built with student privacy first
What we collect. What we don’t.
What we collect
- ·Student name and the essays they write
- ·Diagnostic scores from PKL
- ·Teacher comments and grades
- ·Class membership
What we don’t
- ·Sell or share student data, ever
- ·Train AI models on student writing
- ·Use student data for advertising
- ·Track students outside of PKL
FERPA-aligned. COPPA-aligned for students under 13. You can export or delete student data on request, anytime. Full data processing agreement available for school districts.
AI privacy. Student writing is sent to OpenAI for diagnostic processing under OpenAI’s Data Processing Addendum with Zero Data Retention. No student writing is used to train any model: ours, OpenAI’s, or any third party’s.
SOC 2 Type II in progress. Currently in audit. Existing infrastructure is hosted on SOC 2 Type II audited providers (Supabase, Vercel, OpenAI).
Pricing
Free during the teacher beta.
Teacher Beta
Free for one full year
Beta teachers get full access: unlimited essays, unlimited students, all books, the diagnostic engine, the class dashboard. In exchange, we ask for 30 minutes a month to hear what’s working and what’s missing. After the beta, you keep your access and we’ll lock you into the lowest price we ever offer.
- ✓Up to 150 students across all your classes
- ✓All supported books
- ✓Class dashboard with diagnostic aggregates
- ✓CSV export to your gradebook
- ✓Direct line to the team for feature requests
School and district pricing available after the beta. Per-student licensing starts around $5/year.
Join the beta
Use PKL with one class this term. Free.
We’re working with a small group of English teachers this semester. If that sounds like you, send me a one-paragraph email about your class and I’ll get you set up within a week.
Email Adam to request beta access →Or write me directly at adam@thinkpkl.com. I read every message.