The thesis of this volume is that writing done by students who control their own topics who have genuine purposes for writing and have a real known audience is quite different and valuable in its own right. It forms a rich source of information about how young students think manage their social interactions and use language with competence to get things done. By selecting dialogue journal writing as a corpus for analysis it is possible to observe children s communicative competence in using written language purposefully apart from their ability to master a particular form of writing. The central argument is that dialogue journal communication represents a kind of personal literacy prior to and more comprehensive than the particular literacies emphasized and assessed in schools. The contents include a practitioner s view of the practice itself and a summary of the research study methods developed to analyze interactive written conversations.