A study investigated the effect of word processing on the quality of children's writing. Subjects were 32 fifth-graders in a public school in the suburban town of Livingston, New Jersey. One sample had access to computers in their classroom everyday for writing. The other sample group used computers once a week in the lab; their daily writing instruments were a piece of paper and a pencil. Writing samples were taken as a pretest and posttest and scored holistically. Findings supported the hypothesis that there would be no significant difference in the achievement between the samples of students' writing. It should be noted, however, that the difference in the mean scores approached significance. The implication may be that if this study had been conducted over a longer period of time, the experimental sample that used computers may have shown more significant gains over the control group. This study, along with others previously conducted on this subject, does not provide statistical evidence for the advantage of writing on a computer over traditional methods. Nonetheless, as technology becomes an integral part of their personal, educational and business lives, students must be prepared for computer literacy. (Contains 2 tables of data, 25 references, and related research.) (TB)