Writing Sample Assessment

I examined the writing for a student in 7th grade who is at a lower than grade level in her
reading skills. The assignment was to write a realistic fiction story, however, when I received the
piece from her she was still in the drafting stage and therefore it is not the complete short story.
The story needed to have a character facing a struggle or a conflict, and something that happened
to them recently that caused it to begin or get worse.
The first thing I noticed when reading the student's writing sample was her lack of
capitalization. She does not capitalize at the beginning of a sentence until she starts a quote. This
student reads quickly so I wonder if she types quickly and has now gotten in the habit of
skipping the shift key or if she really does not realize that she needs to capitalize the beginning of
all of her sentences.
She is also inconsistent with her dialogue. She does not make a new line for any of her
dialogue. The first piece of dialogue however, is punctuated extremely well. She capitalizes the
start of the sentence and she has the proper comas and periods. This is where the inconsistency
comes in. She then does not apply this to the rest of her dialogue. The punctuation is inconsistent
in its correctness and for the rest of the writing sample she does not have proper capitalization
for the beginning of the sentence.
Within her piece of writing, she has formed a really cohesive story, so it is nice to see her
comprehension of the assignment. She understands that her character needed to be faced with a
struggle and it is clear that her character has that.Because the sample I have is unfinished, it isnt
very clear where the story is going but at an early attempt at writing fiction, she is doing a decent

job. She also has incorporated inner thoughts extremely well. She uses italics properly when
recording these thoughts and transitions them over into narration and dialogue well. What I
would suggest to her is to add more narration to the story but other than that, the story itself is a
pretty strong piece of writing.
What I would do next for this student is to go over with her the rules for punctuation,
capitalization and quotations. While she could still work on the plot for her story, it is pretty
strong already and I would mostly want her to work on developing more narration, grammar and
possibly strengthening her vocabulary within the piece. She understands the fiction writing part
of the assignment so I would want her to work on her weaknesses in the piece.