A study explored the effect of different kinds of music on children's writing content. Nineteen students from a second grade class in Charlottesville, Virginia, participated in 10 15-minute writing sessions, accompanied in each session by one type of background music (classical, jazz, popular, or country) or by silence. All writing was analyzed for tone, consistency, and number of words. Results showed that: (1) students wrote more words under the classical music condition; (2) there were fewer inconsistent writings when listening to jazz; (3) negative writings were greater in number for all music types than for no music condition; and (4) Top-40 music had a significant negative effect on students' writing, perhaps attributable to students' familiarity with it. (Contains four appendixes with tables of data, and 16 references.) (SR)