This paper considers the issues that distance teachers in higher education who are not writing specialists face in supporting their students' academic writing development. We discuss the usefulness of open web-based writing support resources, and propose the need for a system that serves as an interface with these resources. Such a system should help teachers to make quick selections of materials that can be offered to students to address specific problems in the students' assignments. We consider principles for the design of such a system, based on the experience of building and testing a small prototype for tutors on an Open University Masters in Education course. (Contains 2 tables.)