In developing writing as a communicative skill, students should constantly be
made aware that particular topics in writing fit particular situations and conform
to particular conventions. Conventionally, legal writings use long sentences,
formal language and precise definitions to avoid ambiguity and misinterpretations.
In the context of physical sciences, writing is characterized by short sentences and
short forms or symbolic signs. The role of the language teacher, therefore, is to
teach his students to master not only the language skills but also to master the
standard language which is free from grammatical errors. We use the terms
standard to mean the language which is standardized and accepted for use in
formal communication. For this study, the reference is based on standard
Kiswahili. Thus, to identify writing problems among form three students, a
sample corpus of 60 Kiswahili essays with an average of 500 words each, were
carefully examined from the two schools involved in the present study.