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Abstract This study was designed to compare, on a qualitative and quantitative level, oral and written production in two genres. Children in Grades 3 and 5 were given a short introduction to a narrative and an opinion essay and asked to continue the discourse either in writing or by speaking into a tape recorder. The discourse protocols were then compared with respect to the semantic well‐formedness, cohesion and structure of the discourse, and the number of words produced. The data indicate that children's discourse production is organized according to a schema which is discourse specific, but modality general. Thus, clear differences were obtained between the narratives and the opinion essays on measures of semantic well formedness and structural quality. However, these differences did not occur in a comparison of the oral with the written productions: children's written productions were essentially identical to the oral productions in terms of semantic structure. Thus, children's difficulties with writing can be traced not to the process itself, but to the nature of the discourse that the children are being required to produce. Notes Support for this study was obtained from a Sloane Foundation award to C. Bereiter and a Spencer Foundation award to D. R. Olson, A. Hildyard and N. Torrance. Correspondence and requests for reprints should be addressed to Suzanne E. Hidi, Department of Applied Psychology, The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M55 1V6.