Scoring Stories for the Six Traits

Word Choice  How many words obviously came from a thesaurus? If they have ten or more, give them a 4, unless they also use slang.  3 = they’ve obviously used a thesaurus, but they also have a few slang words too.  2 = they use “said”, “it” and “and” an awful lot! Even if they did use a thesaurus, their repetition and use of slang outweigh their big words.  1 = they use repetition, baby words, and slang; they haven’t been using a thesaurus.

Organization  4 = they have a correctly capitalized title, they have many paragraph breaks, and they never wrote in the margin. Their story has a clear beginning, which leads to an exciting middle. The ending matches all that has been written. Their story is also double-spaced.  3 = they have some paragraph breaks, but they really need more; they also have a title, margins, and a beginning, middle, and clear end to their story.  2 = they have one or two paragraph breaks, and it seems like something is missing from the body of the story.  1 = they don’t use paragraph breaks at all.

Ideas and Content  4 = this is a completely original topic with perfect description.  3 = this is an original topic, but some of the description is lacking. (For example, the reader may only vaguely know what characters and settings look like, smell like, sound like.)  2 = this isn’t a very original topic (other kids have topics just like this one)  1 = this isn’t a story, it’s an essay or a letter or something like that.

Conventions  4 = I couldn’t find any mistakes.  3 = I could only find one or two mistakes.  2 = I could find three to five mistakes.  1 = I could find more than five mistakes.

Sentence Fluency  4 = I didn’t hold up any fingers.  3 = I held up one or two fingers.  2 = I held up three to five fingers.  1 = I held up six or more fingers (or it’s written using something other than ink pen or pencil).

Voice  4 = this story made me laugh, cry, jump for joy, or have another physically obvious and unpreventable reaction!!!  3 = I enjoyed the story A LOT, but it didn’t provoke any really noticeable reactions from me.  2 = Yeah, that’s a story. It was fine.  1 = Did I just read a story? I forgot what I just read, because it was so boring.