Dana Davis

ELD 307
Dr. Casey
Writing Analysis
In second grade, students write on a daily basis with the goal of becoming independent
writers. The purpose of an ongoing writing assessment is to track the progress of all aspects of
the writing process. These aspects include; penmanship, capitalization, spelling, punctuation,
grammar, sentence structure, paragraph structure, writing process, and writing purpose. These
ongoing assessments allow the teacher, student, and parents to see the progress of the students
writing and mark both improvement as well as areas that need to be improved upon.
I chose to assess T, a student in Mrs. Gs 2nd grade class. I chose T by the teachers
suggestion and was not aware of her writing abilities, nor had I seen any writing samples from
the beginning of the school year. I obtained samples of Ts writing from her ongoing writing
folder and made copies of a few pieces in chronological order. I looked for penmanship
improvement, repeated spelling mistakes and spelling improvements, proper capitalization, use
of punctuation, sentence structure, paragraph structure, and if the main idea of the writing piece
was evident. T appears to have very nice penmanship for 2nd grade. It was very easy to read.
The size of her writing seems to vary from large to small from piece to piece, but seems to be
consistent within each piece. Her punctuation was good, but there is a lot of use of the
exclamation point. Capitalization is good at the beginning of sentences and there doesnt appear
to be any random capitalization in the middle of a word or sentence. I did notice that there were
some proper nouns that were not capitalized. T conveys the main idea of her writing very clearly
and seems to stay on topic. The two problems that I noticed were; spelling of the more difficult
words (although she did a great job of spelling phonetically) and sentence structure. Some
sentences run-on. Some of the spelling is inconsistent, whereas a word may be spelled correctly
in one section of the paper, then spelled incorrectly in another area. I would like to note that Ts
illustrations were also very nice.
In assessing Ts writing samples, I would say that the most practice she needs lies in
spelling, over use of punctuation and run-on sentences. With T, I would focus on these areas
through Word Study for spelling and a sentence structure lesson during writers workshop.
Interactive read-aloud or having her read her own stories out loud to look for sentence structure
and punctuation would also help in those areas. Writers workshop is often performed
individually instead of with a partner, but I would pair T with a partner that is either at her level
or she may benefit even more by pairing her with a writer that is a bit stronger than her, so that
they can help guide T and push her to achieve a higher standard of writing.