When students first begin writing more than two or three paragraphs for a class assignment, they begin to learn how to incorporate their own ideas into their work. If they're given an assignment on writing about their favorite foods, some students may be able to develop some ideas based on their opinions and favorite foods, while others may struggle--they wonder if they should talk about the ingredients that go into the dish or why the food is special to them.
If a student doesn't understand how organization works and how much easier it is to write using an outline, that student’s homework is going to look disorganized. If she's writing about her favorite food, she may say, “My favorite food is ham with baked potatoes. I like how the ham smells when it's cooking in the oven. My mom makes great sandwiches the next day and I like eating mine with chips. When my mom is baking the ham, she puts a sweet sauce on it. My favorite baked-potato toppings are green onions, butter and bacon bits.” In this example, the paper has the middle and ending in the wrong order.
The student learns to use “voice” when he allows his own beliefs and way of speaking to come through in his writing. If he's given an assignment to discuss the pros and cons of school uniforms, he can use his own opinions, as well as research he has found, as he writes his essay. If he believes that school uniforms are a bad idea, he can use the research to defend his position. He strengthens his position when he allows his writing to sound like himself and when his passion for the subject comes through.
Conventions are the grammar, punctuation, capitalization and spelling a student uses when she's writing her paper. While the student is writing her first draft, she may leave misspellings in or she may omit some punctuation. As she's working on her final draft, she needs to go sentence by sentence, checking for subject-verb agreement, correct use of periods, commas and question marks, correctly spelled words and proper capitalization of words before she hands in her assignment. A paper in which all conventions have been edited and corrected is much more believable.
The student just beginning to work on writing assignments may not know that some word choices are better than others. If he's assigned to write a paper such as, “My Favorite Pet Is...,” he might write from the heart, but if he doesn’t know that imperatives or active verbs read more strongly than passive verbs, his writing assignment may suffer. When he writes about his pet gerbil, he may write, “I was surprised when I looked in her cage because all of the food was eaten by her.”
Sentence fluency means how the words flow as they are read. A well-constructed sentence allows the words to flow one into the next, taking the reader from one concept to another, much as a hiker moves from rock to rock as he crosses a creek. At first, the student’s writing will have sentences of roughly the same length. Many of her sentences may begin with the same word. As her writing skills mature, she learns to vary her word choice, choosing verbs, nouns and adjectives that create patterns.