A study investigated what can be learned about the strengths and weaknesses of students' writing from direct assessment of writing performance and knowledge of overall student performance. In the first part of the study, all 13 school districts in Alaska participated in an interdistrict writing assessment procedure intended to measure the overall strengths and weaknesses of tenth graders' writing skills. Nine school districts participated in the second part of the study which correlated 668 tenth graders' performance in the direct writing assessment to their performance on standardized tests and to their grade point average. The subjects responded to a writing prompt concerning friendship and were given two 50-minute periods to write and revise their responses. The strengths and weaknesses of the subjects' writing abilities were analyzed for each of six writing traits: ideas and content; organization; voice; word choice; sentence structure; and conventions. Results indicated that: (1) the relationships among the six writing traits were higher than the relationship with the standardized test result; (2) the strongest associations between writing traits and test scores occur with "sentence structure" and "conventions"; and (3) the weakest association between writing traits and test scores occurs with "ideas and content" and "voice." Findings suggest that while the traits are strongly interrelated, they are in fact measuring different components of writing. (Sixteen tables of data are included; appendixes include a list of participating districts, the agenda for early training sessions, definitions of scoring methods, the analytical scoring guide, department of education letters and instruction, participating teachers' comments, contingency tables, and interdistrict writing assessment statistics.) (RS)