This study investigated the writing abilities of 15 brain-damaged patients, with and without drawing difficulties. The task was Chinese character copying. All brain-damaged patients had difficulties in copying characters; however, drawing-disable made this task much more difficult. We also found that the structure of Chinese character is an important influencing factor in character copying. The probability of the enclosed structure characters to be copied incorrectly is higher than the characters of other three structures, and single structure characters are most likely to be written correctly.