The aim of this thesis is to compare how students write narrative texts by hand and on a keyboard. The research addresses the following questions: What quantitative differences are there in students’ narrative texts written by hand and on a keyboard? What qualitative differences are there in students’ narrative texts written by hand and on a keyboard? The materials used are students’ narrative texts written by hand and on a keyboard. The students who wrote the narrative texts are in sixth grade at a school in Stockholm. The theoretical basis of the thesis is Systemic Functional Linguistics, which is a language model consisting of three meta-functions. In this thesis, the ideational function is used, which is one of the three meta-functions. The method that has been used is analysis of the narrative students’ texts. The students’ texts have been analyzed by counting the number of running words and process types. 

Previous research has shown that those who write by hand remember more and perform better. The results showed that the students who wrote their narrative text on a keyboard wrote more words on average than those who wrote by hand. Furthermore, the results also showed that the material process type dominates in all student texts compared to the other process types. It was only the relational process type dominated when students typed on a keyboard compared to by hand.