ABSTRACT
A comprehensive school teacher who was concerned about the level of creative writing that she was able to produce from her third-year middle-band pupils discussed her problem with one of the authors. She felt that the nature of what was required in creative writing made it very diffi cult for her to give the pupils appropriate feedback. We had considerable discussion about the nature of creative writing, trying to decide what was required of the pupils. Finally, we decided to use three basic components of creative writing, i.e. fl uency, elaboration and fl exibility, as the initial measuring tools. Fluency was the number of ideas produced, elaboration was the way in which ideas were spelled out within each sentence and was defi ned in terms of uses of adjectives, adverbs, clauses, phrases, etc., and fl exibility referred to changes in perspective from one idea to the next.
