4th Grade Writing Proficiency Benchmark

All items worth 1 point

Standard I-Process and Habits

First Draft
_______ Uses prewriting strategies to plan and organize ideas
Revising
_______ Adds/deletes words or ideas
_______ Rearranges words, sentences, or phrases
_______ Substitutes richer vocabulary (using resources or thesaurus)
_______ Uses writing checklist
Editing
_______ Notices most errors in spelling by circling words
_______ Attempts to correct most misspelled words
_______ Corrects all punctuation and capitalization
_______ Uses resources to check (e.g., dictionary, checklists, word wall)
Final Draft
_______ Incorporates revisions into final copy
_______ Increases accuracy of the final draft (spelling, punctuation)

Standard II-Audience and Purposes/Author’s Craft

Introduces the Topic

_______ Creates a good lead that grabs the reader’s attention
Develops the topic
_______ Shows awareness of audience
_______ Format is appropriate to audience
_______ Uses logical order (beginning, middle, end)
_______ Has a clear, controlling idea
_______ Sustains the idea throughout the piece (uses supporting details effectively)
_______ Uses individual voice
_______ Uses transitional words/phrases for time flow
_______ Uses strong nouns/verbs
_______ Uses descriptive words to create mind pictures
_______ Uses figurative language, similes, or metaphors
_______ Writes to the prompt
Concludes the topic
_______ Ties story together with appropriate and interesting sentence or section

Standard III-Language Use and Conventions

Style and Syntax
_______ Uses a variety of sentence structures and lengths
_______ Shows evidence of book language, specialized vocabulary
_______ Writes correct sentences all the time (free of run-ons/fragments)
Spelling
_______ Accurate spelling of all high-frequency words
_______ Uses transitional and/or conventional spelling
Punctuation and Conventions
_______ Uses pronouns correctly
_______ Uses subject/verb agreement
_______ Uses end punctuation correctly all the time
_______ Uses additional forms of punctuation correctly (commas in series; city,state; apostrophes)
_______ Indents paragraphs
_______ Uses correct capitalization including beginning of sentences and proper nouns all the time
_______ Writes legibly