The 6 Traits describe good writing. They do not teach a child how to write.
New Zealand has a writing problem that is easy to see and easy to misdiagnose.
Baseline data released with the Government's 2025 "Make It Write" plan showed 41% of Year 3 students at the expected writing benchmark, 33% in Year 6, and 24% in Year 8. Sixty-one percent of Year 8 students were more than a year behind. Writing got harder as school went on.
When a child's work is thin or almost unreadable, adults reach for a quality checklist: more ideas, better organisation, more "voice". Those words come from 6+1 Trait Writing, developed at Education Northwest (then the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory) and taken into classrooms by Vicki Spandel and Ruth Culham. The model names what strong writing looks like. It is not a complete answer to how writing is taught.
Structured literacy, The Writing Revolution, and New Zealand's refreshed English curriculum talk about skills built in order, before a piece is worth scoring. Assessment language and instruction are different jobs. Keep them separate.
What the 6+1 model actually is
Education Northwest designed 6+1 as a model of instruction and assessment: shared vocabulary and analytic rubrics instead of one holistic grade. Culham is clear that the traits describe any kind of writing — narrative, explanation, argument — and are not a closed programme.
The six traits, in Education Northwest's sense:
- Ideas — the message: a clear focus, with details that matter.
- Organisation — internal structure the reader can follow.
- Voice — the writer's presence for a purpose and audience, not just "be yourself".
- Word choice — precise language rather than decoration.
- Sentence fluency — how sentences sound and move; rhythm and variety, not only correctness.
- Conventions — spelling, punctuation, grammar, capitalisation, paragraphing.
The +1 is presentation: form and layout of the finished piece. A 2011 US Department of Education report dates this optional seventh trait to a 1999 scoring-guide revision. Presentation is how the product looks. It is not teaching handwriting to automaticity.
Education Northwest still hosts K–2 and 3–12 rubrics (updated 2021). It no longer offers 6+1 training.
What 6 Traits does well
It names quality without one mark: a child can have a sharp idea and collapsing sentences. It gives a school a stable conversation — parents can hear "organisation is the problem, not effort." Spandel argued the traits' real destiny was revision: which trait to work on next.
New Zealand teachers already live in a similar space. e-asTTle Writing scores ideas, structure and language, organisation, vocabulary, sentence structure, punctuation, and spelling. Those dimensions overlap the traits. They are still a picture of the product.
What the evidence actually says
The fairest experimental test is Coe, Hanita, Nishioka and Smiley's 2011 cluster-randomised study of Grade 5 students in 74 Oregon schools (NCEE 2012-4010). After controlling for baseline scores, 6+1 Trait Writing lifted holistic writing by 0.109 standard deviations — roughly the 50th percentile to the 54th. Trait scores were significant for organisation, voice, and word choice. Ideas, sentence fluency, and conventions were not.
That is not "no effect". It is modest, and weakest on the traits structured-literacy writing spends the most time teaching: sentences and conventions. A quality rubric does not automatically produce the motor and syntactic skills underneath it.
What structured literacy writing adds
Writing is not one skill. Virginia Berninger's Not-So-Simple View of Writing splits it into transcription (handwriting, spelling, keyboarding), text generation (words, sentences, discourse), and executive functions (planning, attention, revising), all running through working memory. Joan Sedita's Writing Rope braids a similar set: transcription, syntax, text structure, writing craft, and critical thinking.
The 6 Traits sit mainly on the product side of that braid. They describe the piece once text exists. They do not teach a seven-year-old to form letters without burning working memory, or a twelve-year-old to hold two ideas in one sentence.
That is the structured-literacy job. New Zealand's English learning area (Years 0–10, in force from 1 January 2026) defines structured literacy approaches as explicit, systematic, and cumulative. For writing they include handwriting, systematic synthetic phonics for spelling, vocabulary and morphology, syntax, fluency, text structure, writing processes, plus oral language and comprehension.
Phase 1 (Years 0–3) weights constrained skills that can be brought to automaticity: phonemic awareness, phonics, and handwriting. The rationale is cognitive load. Phase 2 (Years 4–6) keeps those skills in view and expands unconstrained ones — vocabulary, purpose, audience, and more complex syntax. That is a teaching sequence, not a scoring language.
Sentence-level instruction is not decoration
Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler's The Writing Revolution (the Hochman Method) is one map for that sequence, not the only one. Their principles contradict a common habit: assign a long piece, then score it for voice. Students need explicit instruction from the early years. Sentences are the building blocks. Writing belongs in curriculum content; grammar belongs in students' own sentences; planning and revising matter more than "just get words down".
If students cannot write a controlled sentence, a multi-paragraph essay overloads them. Sentence combining — fusing simple sentences into more complex ones — has a stronger research trail than trait workshops on their own. Graham and Perin's Writing Next meta-analysis put it at about 0.50, against a long record that isolated grammar rules do not transfer.
TWR's flagship story (New Dorp High School, in The Atlantic) is practice evidence, not a New Zealand RCT. Treat it as a method with clear logic, not a miracle. Because / but / so, appositives, subordinating conjunctions, and paragraph outlines are teachable moves. "Add more voice" is not.
Do not mash the models into one slogan
It is tempting to market "structured 6 Traits writing". Sources that know both frameworks usually refuse that mash-up.
Smekens Education puts it cleanly: the 6+1 Traits name ingredients in the writing (the product). The Writing Rope and the Not-So-Simple View also name the writer — the processes that have to run while the product is being made. You still have to teach handwriting, spelling, sentences, and planning as skills.
Presentation is a trap word. On a 6+1 rubric it means layout. In structured literacy, handwriting is a transcription skill that must become automatic so ideas can get onto the page. Scoring a messy book as "weak presentation" does not teach grip, formation, or fluency.
Voice is the other trap. For a child who cannot yet control syntax, "find your voice" often means "write like you talk". Voice grows after a writer can choose structures for a purpose. A science explanation is not a diary. That is craft, not personality.
Use 6 Traits (or e-asTTle dimensions) to see the work. Use structured, sequenced instruction to change it.
What this looks like in practice
- Daily transcription. Handwriting (later keyboarding) and spelling, short and explicit, until they are not the bottleneck — in line with the new English sequence and Make It Write handwriting guidance.
- Sentence work on real content. Finish stems from science or a shared text: Tūī are important pollinators because / but / so…
- Then score with traits. Once there is a paragraph: Is the idea clear? Is the order logical? Do the sentences vary on purpose? Are conventions helping the reader?
Schools already protect substantial literacy time, including a daily hour of writing in the basics mandate. Time is not the whole problem. Sequence is.
If you are a parent, the useful question is not "Does this school do 6 Traits?" It is: When my child writes, are they being taught how to build a sentence and get words onto the page automatically — or only being told what a good story should feel like?
Good writing has traits. Writers are made by instruction.