Direct and Indirect Effects of Literacy Skills and Writing Fluency on Writing Quality Across Three Genres

Data were collected for this study early in the school year to analyze the direct and indirect effects of word-level literacy skills (word recognition, spelling, and written vocabulary use) and handwriting fluency on writing quality across three genres of typewritten papers. We further explored whether typing fluency and text generation fluency mediated the effects. Finally, we examined whether there was any difference in the effects across three writing genres. Fourth and fifth graders (N = 175) from 21 typical classrooms in 12 different Midwestern U.S. schools participated. Regression path analyses were employed and revealed that word-level literacy skills had both significant direct and serial indirect effects on quality, via typing fluency and then text generation fluency (text length) when controlling for handwriting fluency. Further, handwriting fluency had no direct effect when controlling for word-level literacy skills but did have a significant serial indirect effect on writing quality via typing fluency then text generation fluency. Results indicate that handwriting fluency matters, even when composing on the computer. Stronger transcription fluency, particularly by hand, leads to higher quality writing, likely because less cognitive effort is devoted to transcription. This study adds to limited research on the cross-modal effects of transcription on writing quality.