A language-levels model was used to analyze written narratives. The results have implications for instruction and for documenting change in the story-writing performance of students with and without special needs in the area of written language development. This study was based on stories written at midyear by 277 students (224 typical learners and 53 children with special difficulty in the area of written language) across grade levels one through five. Measures that differentiated students by grade level and special difficulty are reported by language level. Discourse-level measures were total words, total T-units, and story scores. Sentence-level measures were sentence codes (simple or complex, correct or incorrect), mean length of T-unit, and number and types of conjunctions. Word-level measures were number of different words and proportions of words spelled correctly. Gender differences were found for productivity measures in favor of females; no differences were found when comparing stories written by African American and Caucasian students. (Contains 5 tables.)