The utility of behavior management in a college English course designed to repair or develop the student's skills in the written language is studied. The subjects were community college students who had demonstrated rhetorical or mechanical weaknesses in the use of the written language. The students were told they would have to complete all of the required tasks to a minimum standard of achievement, as judged by the instructor. Each would be awarded a minimum number of points for each step so completed; he could revise as often as he wished until he had gained the maximum number of points designated for that task. The effects of this approach are: (1) The teacher read the students' work with great care; (2) The student modelled upon the teacher's own style, thereby improving his own prose style. Post-testing revealed a meaningful increase in recognition of sentence and paragraph patterns well beyond the .01 level of significance. (CK)