This study investigated the effects of the "Expressive Writing (EW)" direct instruction curriculum on the expository writing skills of secondary grade students with serious emotional and behavioral disabilities (EBD). The "EW" program targets writing mechanics, sentence writing, and editing but does not include pre-writing writing instruction. Thus, we investigated the effects of adding a pre-writing procedural facilitator (PF) with "EW". Using a repeated-measures quasi-experimental design, we matched and randomly assigned twenty-nine secondary grade students with EBD to one of two treatment groups (1) "EW" alone or (2) "EW" plus PF. Students received 11 consecutive weeks of daily 50-min instruction. We employed hierarchical growth modeling to analyze nearly 1500 permanent products. Results indicated statistically significant intra-individual writing growth regardless of treatment group. Moreover, the "EW" plus PF group exhibited faster linear growth (p = 0.055) across the duration of the intervention.