The purpose of this paper is to portray children's writing as a medium for participation in social response to an audience, in a situation where children are active contributors to evolving written dialogues. Throughout this 2-year project, data were collected by compiling the e-mail correspondence between the adults (the researcher and five graduate students) and 5 to 6 children that took place weekly from September through April of each school year. The children's classroom teacher and the researcher kept logs to follow the children's development as writers. Quantitative analysis was used to clarify patterns of activity in the data which would lead to the "comprehensive description and interpretation of meaning" of the children's e-mail letters. Within- and across-case data analysis examined variations in the nature of the child and adult e-mail letters across participants, within each participant case, and across time. The unit of analysis was the e-mail exchange, which included the initiating child letter and all further adult-child letter exchanges that maintained a topical focus. The critical parts of an e-mail exchange were then compared in order to derive the following coding categories that described the variation between units: language functions; presentation styles; temporal sequence; and tone the children and adults used when communicating. This set of components was applied to the data in order to describe the nature of the writing across the group of children. Two tables show e-mail language functions and presentation styles. (Contains 25 references.) (AEF)