During 1983, an observational study was carried out in four classrooms in two schools in Wellington, New Zealand, with the following objectives in mind: (1) to describe the different writing tasks, assigned to the students, (2) to outline the guidance students were given in order to help them complete their writing tasks, (3) to establish which strategies students adopted in order to carry out written tasks, and (4) to determine some of the difficulties students encountered with writing and how they coped with these difficulties. The schools consisted of an intermediate and a secondary school. Brief conversations with the teachers and case study students occurred daily throughout the study. Findings showed that, typically, intermediate school students' written work was brief in nature (consisting of single sentences or short paragraphs), tended to be descriptive or factual, and was often copied. Secondary school students' written work was also relatively brief (commonly from one to three sentences in length except in English class where short paragraphs were often required), usually descriptive and in response to questions set by the teacher, and often copied or derived from passages in folders or notes on the blackboard. (HOD)