A four-year study by the Bay Area Writing Project was conducted to determine the writing competency of inner-city secondary school students on proficiency tests. To determine whether patterns among secondary students reflected developmental trends, the study also examined samples of student writing from grades 4 through 12, for the years 1978, 1980, and 1981. The study concluded that the essays at the four levels of writing competency contained four underlying speech events: (1) encoding, (2) conversations, (3) presentations, and (4) expositions. Based on the theory of underlying speech events, which provides a way of understanding the problems of students who are attempting to move from one competency level to another, the study suggested fluency, focus, and form as three primary problems for students as they move from low to high competency levels. (Writing samples are included in the body of the report, and appendixes include an example of coded copy of student writing during a videotape session, rankings of anchor- or prototype papers by national sample, examples of coding sheets, samples of the anchor- or prototype papers, and a ten-page bibliography.) (HTH)