This article describes a project which identified the skills and abilities in written literacy of pre-service teachers, as well as their needs in this area. An intervention to address their needs is evaluated and its outcomes assessed, using a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses. Results show that it is possible to improve these students' literacy skills and awareness even with such a short intervention as is described here. However, the intervention was most successful in dealing with lower-level linguistic variables such as punctuation and spelling, in contrast to higher-level text and paragraph structures.