Students in grade 8 are increasingly challenged to sharpen their ability to write and speak with more clarity and coherence, providing clear reasons and relevant evidence to support their conclusions. While the writing standards specify that students will focus on narrative, explanatory, and argumentative writing, 8th grade students will also discover how to answer self-generated questions through writing and research.
In all of these writing opportunities, students aim toward organizing and developing their ideas with specific evidence and writing in such a way that transitions, word choice, and sentence structure all contribute to readability and meaning. Throughout the writing process, students will also learn how to prewrite, revise and edit to make their writing stronger.
These writing standards are strongly linked to a student’s understanding of literature and informational text as well as to their language standards.
Calculation Method for Strands
Strands are larger groups of related standards. The Strand Grade is a calculation of all the related standards. Click on the standard name below each strand to access the learning targets and proficiency scales for each strand's related standards.
Strand (W)