This study focuses on differences in pupils’ use of written structuring strategies in the Englishsubject between grade school year 9 and upper secondary school year 2. The initial hypothesis isthat there is a statistically significant development in the use of structuring strategies between theupper secondary school pupils and their junior counterparts. This research is mainly aimedtowards new teachers and teacher students who want to understand and help their pupils’naturally occurring expository writing. Through the course of this research the hypothesis hasbeen tested and debunked. There are, according to the T-tests done on the numbers given by thisresearch, no statistically significant developments in the use of structuring strategies between thetwo pupil age groups. This study has shown some interesting results in the development, or rathernon-development, in the pupils’ communicative skills in writing.The method used in this study is a cross-sectional and corpus-based research of naturallyoccurring data, where the information is derived from analysing the standardized Swedishnational writing tests in grade school year 9 and upper secondary school year 2 where the testsare obligatory. This paper analyses a total of 156 handwritten essays.