This study employed multiple regression analysis to examine the relati
onship between global writing quality (holistic scores) and lower leve
l analytic measures of writing, with a focus on cohesive indices. The
subjects were 9-year-old English-speaking children who participated in
either a story free-writing condition or a story rewriting condition.
The results showed that both cohesive indices and lower level writing
measures (type-token ratios, mean length of utterances in morphemes,
composition length, etc.) each accounted for a significant amount of t
he variance in holistic scores. The story rewriting procedure proved t
o facilitate the children's writing processes and, hence, resulted in
higher quality writing (in terms of both global writing quality and te
xt cohesion) than the story free-writing condition.