Differences between reporting and classificatory functions in writing were examined in the responses of grade 10 and grade 12 students: 60 who were successful English students, and 60 on the borderline of passing in each of the grades. The reporting tasks required students to write compositions describing their first day in a high school or some similar event and to report on the most interesting television show they had recently watched. The classificatory tasks required students to write compositions on the problems of old age and of crime. Thus 480 compositions were analyzed in terms of five cognitive and four stylistic linguistic features. The analyses found that, as compared with reporting, the classificatory writing called for more abstraction, more tentativeness, more clauses of condition and concession, and greater syntactical complexity. Classificatory writing discouraged students from prefacing, interrupting, and adding loosely to their core statements since it called for less free modification before the subject or between the subject and main verb, and for less modification set off by points after the main verb. In addition, there seemed to be a correlation (not investigated statistically) between the uses of the features characteristic of older and superior students and writing used to develop thoughts rather than merely to state opinions. (HOD)