State writing standards can be a little difficult to digest. The following combined list of elementary and middle school state writing standards provides an excellent overview of what is essential in both elementary and middle school writing.
Pattern Based Writing: Quick & Easy Essay provides a rock-solid foundation for addressing every one of these critical state writing standards.
These standards have been simplified and rephrased in a way that should make them a bit easier to understand. Even one serious read-through will provide significant guidance in planning your writing instruction!
1. Students write stories with a beginning, middle, and end and details creating and supporting the setting, character development, and plot.
2. Students write an interpretation or explanation of an informational text using evidence from the text that supports the interpretation or explanation.
3. Students write formal business letters to professional audiences such as businesses, newspapers, or government leaders.
4. Students write multi-paragraph essays and reports with easy-to-follow organization, topic development, effective use of detail, and various sentence structures.
5. Student writing develops a central idea. Their writing demonstrates knowledge of their audience and their purpose.
6. Students successfully utilize all the writing process stages, including prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing successive versions.
7. Students successfully write multiple-paragraph compositions with an introductory paragraph, establish and support a main idea, contain supporting paragraphs that develop the main idea, and conclude with a summary paragraph.
8. Students use appropriate communication structures such as compare and contrast, cause and effect, asking and answering questions, and chronological order.
9. Students write expository, narrative, persuasive, and descriptive compositions of between 500 and 1000 words.
10. Students create narrative compositions that establish and develop a plot or situation. They describe the setting and present an ending.
11. Students create multi-paragraph expository compositions that establish and develop a topic with important ideas and events. They provide details and transitions linking paragraphs and ideas. The composition contains a concluding paragraph which summarizes important ideas and details.
12. Students write narratives with sensory details and concrete language that develop the plot and characters.
