Abstract
This study investigated the effect of sentence-combining practice on adult writing. It was hypothesized that those adults who practiced sentence manipulation would combine groups of short sentences and write composi tions syntactically different from those written by similar students not ex posed to such sentence-combining practice. Thirty-eight females who enrolled in an occupational training program served as the experimental and control groups. The experimental group was involved in sentence- combining activities for 12 hours over a six-week period (plus 28 hours of regular instruction) while the control group spent 40 hours on the regular curriculum. As predicted, findings indicated that the experimental group increased significantly in their ability to write more mature sentences, as evidenced by T-unit length and, secondarily, by number of sentence transformations.
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