Introduction At one time very little emphasis in learning to write was placed on what young children wanted to 'say'. Writing in the early years of school was often little more than handwriting practice copied from the blackboard. However, researchers have found that children's earliest marks, as observed in preschool settings and the home, are both systematic and logical, as in Hannah's example in Figure 6.1, where a letter stands, for the most part, for a whole word. It seems

that children develop hypotheses about the process that gradually emerge as

they encounter written words in the world around them, most predominantly

from books that are read to them. Among the assumptions they tend to make

about the writing process are: that there is a minimum word length, i.e. that a

word should have at least three letters (not one to which Hannah conforms);

that there is a relationship between the size of the object they are writing about

and the letters they use, e.g. an elephant would be written in large letter-like

forms whereas a mouse would be written much smaller; or that length of word

relates to the ages of the people involved, as with Mariana who decided that she

has four letters in her name because she was four years old, whereas her father,

who she thought to be very old, had a thousand!1 As children develop as writers

they are able to cope with a wide range of written styles, learning to use these

to get across their thinking compellingly and with ever-increasing precision in

terms of style and form. How they can be helped to achieve this will be

discussed in this chapter.