The article reports on the challenges faced by linguistically diverse international graduate students (IGSs) in English as a Second Language (ESL) Academic Writing (AEW), as well as ways to address these challenges through an online tutorial. IGSs whose first language is other than English often struggle with grammar, academic vocabulary, narrative logic, and referencing. However, research on the specific needs of this student group and alternative instructional models remains limited. This article seeks to help fill that gap. The objectives of the study are to analyze AEW difficulties experienced by IGSs and to explore whether these challenges can be effectively addressed through an online writing tutorial. A series of online tutorials was designed by the authors to support IGSs in writing literature reviews (LR). The data presented in this article are drawn from two primary sources. The first includes 168 responses to a ‘start-up’ survey completed by participants who expressed interest in the tutorial. This survey explored the IGSs’ experiences with and challenges in ESL academic writing (AEW). The results indicate that participants encountered a range of difficulties that negatively impacted their performance in their academic programs. The second source of data consists of ‘exit survey’ responses from the 31 participants who completed all tutorial activities, along with their writing scores, as assessed by three independent raters. Both the participants’ self-evaluations and the assessors’ scores showed improvements in genre awareness, source integration, and academic language use. The article concludes by discussing the pedagogical implications of these findings.