Students need to understand the differences between spoken and written language. They should write with a meaningful purpose and audience in mind. Teachers need to model and jointly construct writing before expecting students to independently produce written texts. During this modelling and joint construction, explicit teaching is required in relation to the features of language, for example, sentence structure, text structure, correct grammar, spelling and punctuation.

Writing can be marked using an analytic rubric which provides diagnostic information to teachers about students’ achievements in writing. The criteria in the rubric should provide a comprehensive picture of each student’s skills. Specific criteria will give information about students’ abilities to:

• understand the sense of audience and the engagement of the reader as they write

• understand and use specific text features of for example, a persuasive argument or narrative

• organise the text in a meaningful way using a variety of sentence structures, appropriate sequencing and text connectives to control the text

• use typical grammatical features to meet the purpose of the writing

• use a range of language devices and precise vocabulary

• spell and punctuate