The Texas Educational Assessment of Minimum Skills (TEAMS) was developed by the Texas Education Agency (TEA), in response to Texas House Bill 72 (1984), which mandated a new basic skills assessment program for mathematics, reading, and writing at grades 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11. This document is one in a series of Instructional Strategies Guides designed to familiarize Texas educators with the types of strategies employed in assessing learner mastery of TEAMS objectives and to provide suggested instructional activities that can be used to promote mastery of those objectives. This guide focuses on the TEAMS writing objectives for grade 7. It provides a detailed description of the test items used to measure each writing objective. The ten objectives are subsumed under five skill areas: (1) mechanics (capitalization, punctuation, and spelling); (2) English usage; (3) sentency formation; (4) proofreading; and (5) organization/appropriate response to purpose and audience (informative/descriptive writing, informative/narrative writing, informative/classificatory writing, and persuasive/descriptive writing). The following information is provided for six of the objectives: (1) a description of the objective; (2) a sample item; (3) test questions; (4) answer choices; (5) answer analysis for the sample item; (6) instructional emphases; and (7) possible instructional activities. (JAZ)