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Written language, the vehicle for communication between generations and continents, has its roots in human speech and the words that children utter to their caregivers and to their teddy bears. By the time children enter school, we expect them to express their thoughts using an array of phrases, clauses, and sentences. The development of written language skill, however, is not nearly so simple or natural. Language in its written form necessitates that children control their pencils, learn the alphabet and the rules for sound-symbol correspondence, and become adept at a means of expression requiring a high degree of metalinguistic awareness and planning.
Although we may be biologically wired to speak, we are not predisposed to write. Children's first efforts to express themselves with paper and pencil pale in contrast to what they can articulate. With time, good instruction, and practice, young children learn to transcribe their letters and put words to paper. Once in middle school, students write on a level that is potentially commensurate with their oral language skill: "If I can say it, I can write it." By the time they reach high school, their skill on paper may well exceed their verbal prowess, and studies suggest that continued oral language development will depend on their experience with and mastery of written language forms (Levine & Reed, 1999).
Written language is linguistically complex, and it requires a degree of planning and organization that is not consistent with the spontaneity of speech. Because there is no possibility of conversational repair or context, writers must anticipate readers' questions and limitations. As a result, writers are forced to employ greater clarity through the use of more sophisticated vocabulary and sentences of increasing length. The increase in sentence length arises from the need to express abstract relationships and higher-level thoughts. Sentences link ideas in time and place, and express causal relationships and notions of exclusion (as in, "I like to travel but I don't like to fly"). According to Cazden (1972, p. 83), a mature style of writing reflects "the ability to pack a greater density of ideas into a single sentence by embedding one sentence into another." Scott (2004) adds that linguistic literacy presumes skill with a wide range of syntactic structures suited to different...