Although a key concept in various writing textbooks, learning standards, and writing rubrics, voice remains a construct that is only loosely defined in the literature and impressionistically assessed in practice. Few attempts have been made to formally investigate whether and how the strength of an author's voice in written texts can be reliably…

This study investigated the validity of four theoretically motivated traits of writing ability across English and Korean, based on elementary school students' responses to letter- and story-writing tasks. Their responses were scored analytically and analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis. The findings include the following. A model of writing…