My friend Nathan found this among his elementary school papers. I love it. Note the terse realism.
He also found our dinosaur reports. Mine isn’t bad, but his is awesome. This is the kind of thing he probably got in trouble for for not following the rules of the assignment, but I think he deserved extra credit.
Mine:
His:
Yeah, that is awesome.
Chris Cocca 
This is awesome.
When I was reading through these, I noticed that we BOTH used story in our dinosaur reports to communicate our facts. Nobody else did that. Made me feel like even then we were destined to become writers!
Great reports! Did you guys use actual typewriters for these?
Depending on when exactly this was, I would have been using, if anything, a Brother2000 word processor. That thing was sweet. It had internal memory to save files to and everything. My mom helped greatly with the presentation aspect of projects like these. I did not learn to type properly until the mid-90’s. (Thank you, AIM).
Two great third grade writing errors in mine:
Subject gender disorder:
“She can’t find anything at sea so it tried to find something that the water has washed up.”
But even better is that I kept switching from past to present tense and then back again.
Reblogged this on Chris Cocca and commented:
In honor of this week’s weather, I offer this piece from second grade. Late ’86 or early ’87. Enjoy the terse realism of “The Snowy Day” and bonus dinosaur reports.