The authors investigated whether a series of mini prewriting assignments linked to a formal paper describing an original research project would improve preservice elementary teachers' writing abilities in a science context. They compared 38 final reports from students who completed the prewriting assignments with 38 reports randomly selected from semesters prior to the prewriting assignments and analyzed the reports using the spelling, style, and grammar checker in Microsoft Word 2003 to detect errors. The results showed significant differences in the number of words per report and punctuation errors. (Contains 2 tables.)