Assistance in pupils’ development as individuals is an important part of what schools, according to regulatory documents, are obliged to offer. Bearing in mind that language is a vital part of both identity and learning, the pupils’ ‘own voices’ are crucial to this mission. The purpose of this study is to investigate and discuss how teachers can support and help pupils to find, express and develop these ‘own voices’, with a particular focus on how it’s done in written texts. Therefore, pupil-written texts have been collected and analysed in relation to 1) task instructions and 2) source texts. The main question in this analysis is whether or not different text portions in each pupil-written text are to be considered reproduced against either or both of these, or if they are to be considered the pupils’ own productions. The study primarily reveals that the task instructions are of great importance to the pupil-written texts. They function as starting points and guidance, and there is every reason for teachers to observe this and put effort into what the task instructions communicate.