Establishing meaningful communication is the ultimate goal of verbal expression, which is the basic skill of the entire education and one of the key values of general culture. Developing and nurturing a culture of expression in written form is an important task of teaching and it is realized, among other things, through evaluation of pupils' written compositions. The authors of this study compare the attitudes of teachers (N = 273) and pupils (N = 257) (a) about the importance of evaluation of content, orthography, grammar, style and aesthetic categories for developing the culture of expression; (B) about the impact of evaluation on the improvement of pupils' verbal expression. The research results show that teachers find essay evaluation most important for the advancement of stylistic features, while students believe that the purpose of essay evaluation is adoption and expansion of grammatical knowledge. Teachers and pupils agree in assessing that pointing out errors and oversights is more productive than discussing values in pupils' essays. For the acquisition of knowledge about language, as well as the ability to activate that knowledge in the act of oral or written communication, chief responsibility lies with the school, i.e. the teacher as a key factor of systematic and continuous development and nurturing of the culture of expression. Considerable attention in teaching is paid to enabling pupils to master the utility functions of language and developing the ability to use its expressive possibilities, which results in the highest level of quality of knowledge, but it also leads to neglecting the importance of affirmative evaluation of certain elements of essays, which has a motivational effect on pupils.