Written language calls for giving overall attention to both form and content in ways that cannot be learned about solely through becoming skilled at oral language. It draws upon and uses structures and grammatical constructions that seem to be rare in everyday speech or informal conversation. The following examples highlight some of the strategies that students apparently brought to this writing task.

Student achievements on this writing task ranged from grammatically correct but unengaging pieces through to writing that was full of impact yet somehow lacking polish. Just occasionally, student writing at both Year 4 and Year 8 combined both of these aspects. Some writing showed the hallmarks of distinctively “literate” forms - through balanced clause structure, a sense of personal voice and overall craft of writing. Less well-crafted writing lacked this tightness and appeared, by contrast, to be more closely aligned with the more iterative structures of oral forms of expression. These ideas will be discussed in more detail in the sections that follow. Overall the writing samples examined revealed students at both year levels grappling with a range of “writerly” challenges as they sought to give expression to their ideas.

[NOTE: Where necessary these examples have had the spelling corrected so that attention is placed on the structure of the writing rather than on deciphering the writer's intentions. Spelling was not a focus for this probe study so the intention for all spelling efforts was accepted. Punctuation errors have been left as they were written. No other changes have been made to the students' writing.]

One Sunday I went to the hot pools and I [went] swimming. I went down the slide and then I had some lunch and we got some hot chips and they were yummy and then I went back into the water and when we went to the pools in the car I said mum are we there yet and the stupid radio was on and I was playing sweet and sour. (Year 4)

The day I will never forget is my big birthday party. I will never forget that day because we got to paint our faces and play lots of games and we played with my little puppy and I got to invite eight friends over but only three came over. (Year 4)

A day I'll never forget is when I went to my mate Chevy's party and they were drinking and Tamaiti was there and I asked if I could ride on his bike and he said yes. So I went down the hill and came back up and my mate Ata jumped on it and we went down the hill fast and I said boy there's no brakes but there was and she was falling all over me and I could not see and she was drunk and there was a party down the road from Chevy's. (Year 8)

When I was at school out at L. I was playing on the playground and I broke my arm while I was swinging on the mice bars and my friend ran to the office to get someone and they came to pick me up and then we went to ring my mum because she had to pick me up and take me to the hospital and I got eight x-rays but it was badly broken so I had to go to the theatre to get my arm pinned and I was in hospital for six weeks and when it was over I was put in a wheelchair and taken to my room and it was not fun for the six weeks so let's go back to when I was in my bed. (Year 8)

One might me, mum, and dad went out for tea but Snowy my dog had to stay at home. But dad forgot to close the windows and it was really cold that night. My dog Snowy got out of the window and went down the road to my friend's home and my friend came back to my home and he got my dog and he tied him up and he froze in the ditch that night. We came home and found him dead. (Year 8)

It was my grandmother's birthday on Sunday and she is 89 years old and she wants to beat my auntie's record of 91 and I think she is going to do just that. (Year 8)

Last year I went to my uncle's medieval club. I had to wear chain mail and I had to carry a real heavy sword and shield. When I got hit by a sword it felt as if it had gone straight through my chain mail. I felt as if I was going to die. When I got struck pain shot through me like lightning. Luckily I didn't get cut. (Year 4)

We were all ready in our Irish dancing dresses. Kate was trying to get our attention. She said she was hyperventilating but everyone knew she wasn't. (Year 8)

At the beginning of the year, March, we made a cycle trip to Waiheke Island. We went in the bus to the port and waited for the ferry to arrive. We waited in the cold weather, the wind blowing furiously. (Year 8)

And then the worst bit happened. We waited. We waited for what seemed like a lifetime. (Year 8)

5 weeks ago my mum's second best friend came to stay. Something terrible had happened. My mum's friend came and told us what had happened. She saw her husband stressed out so she ran out as fast as she could and then she wasn't allowed to contact her husband. So we had eight kids staying at out house for a whole week. There were a lot of dishes to be done which was quite dumb. But we had help. Then when they had things sorted out they went back up to their house. (Year 4)

We went to benchmark to get 20 planks of wood and boy they were big. We went to Resene to get some nails and some paint. I chose red and blue for my tree-house. We got to work. I started on the chimney while my dad started on the windows. Then we both did the roof and body. Then it was done. All we had to do was the painting. (Year 4)

I will never forget being in Movie World. We went to the Goldcoast with my mum and two sisters and me. We decided we would go. I said movie world. So we went to movie world. (Year 4)
The meeting was about our behaviour we should use while in public. (Year 8)

“This person is putting up his hand to tell his story and to get more and more learned at reading.” (Year 8)

“Because in this one someone's reading it to them [points]…and in this one [points] they're listening to it on some headphones so they don't have to read it theirselves.” (Year 8)

(i) Punctuation and Handwriting
Punctuation is a writing convention that receives a lot of attention in classroom teaching. Certainly students need to learn how to use these symbols correctly, and to understand that one of the main reason for using full stops and capital letters correctly is to improve clarity and avoid ambiguity. As was discussed in Section 2, this study revealed no marked increase in mastery of punctuation by Year 8 level.

Although punctuation and handwriting are features of writing that have no counterparts in speech, some students nevertheless tried to exploit these features to carry meaning or emphasis or emotion in their writing. One piece of writing had a total of 23 exclamation marks in it. Some students introduced into their writing such devices as block capitalisation, underlining, and other hieroglyphics to personalise their work and perhaps also to overcome some of the 'distance' limitations of print.

In the NEMP attitudinal survey, students were asked to indicate their personal opinions about writing, their skills and their strengths as writers. Statistical findings reported in section 2 suggested there was no clear connection between students' sense of their own writing ability and the quality of the writing they produced in this task. Students were also cautious when gauging what their teacher thought of their writing and when asked what they thought they needed to do to get better at writing, few students at either Year 4 or Year 8 could articulate specific, achievable skills to work. Typical responses were at best vague:

Close analysis of these writing samples and writing surveys raises some fascinating issues surrounding the teaching of writing. There are a variety of language features in students' writing that merit attention. Certainly the study revealed some surface errors that would benefit from proofreading - e.g., checking for instances of omitted words, correcting punctuation marks such as capital letters, commas and full stops. Many of the issues and notable features of these writing submissions go beyond the surface features of writing. Weaknesses in grammatical construction, overuse of conjunctions, and other issues relating to both form and content are errors that students might not detect for themselves in the writing or the editing process. Some “errors” (for example, those relating to a student's experimentation with grammatical structures) might in fact herald growth and experimentation with more complex forms.

Analysis also underlines the fact that if student writing is to be assessed solely or largely in terms of punctuation, paragraphing and other surface grammar features, potential depth, impact or personal voice in the writing might be overlooked. It might also negatively influence a student's sense of what constitutes really good writing. Teachers might unwittingly reinforce this attitude through their marking strategies. A writing submission that is technically correct and grammatically sound is not necessarily one that is especially memorable, and beneath the untidiness and misplaced pronunciation of a students' writing there can sometimes be found a significant writing voice. Close analysis of these samples points to the importance of detailed structural teaching to enable students to understand how and why some literary constructions work better than others. Close examination of these writing samples suggests that at least some of the difficulties students encounter when composing effective written language may stem from misunderstandings about the fundamental differences between the spoken and written forms. Students use in their writing the grammatical forms and language structures with which they are familiar.