First-year undergraduate science students experienced a writing program as an important part of their assessment in a biology subject. The writing program was designed to help them develop both their scientific understanding as well as their written scientific expression. Open-ended questionnaires investigating the quality of the experience of learning through writing were distributed to 165 students. Interviews with six tutors on the writing program were also completed. Key results included that if students were not aware of the potential of learning science through writing, they tended to focus on superficial aspects of the writing experience, such as grammar, rather than the scientific knowledge that underpinned the experience. The results have important implications for the integration of writing experiences into university subjects and tutor approaches to writing tuition. (Contains 10 tables and 1 figure.)