Modern transformational grammars can be effective tools for writing, for they offer hypotheses and generalizations about English sentences which can be used in an infinite number of linguistic contexts. One writing skill which transformational grammars can help students achieve is the ability to choose between synonymous expressions. Some transformations which have rhetorical significance are the passive voice, the "there" transformation, extraposition, and the cleft. Each of these transformations enables a writer to take different syntactic routes through a sentence. Another transformation which has rhetorical significance is clause consolidation, or the ability of a mature writer to embed a number of sentences into one. While this discussion of transformations does not prove the extent to which transformational grammar can be related to the teaching of writing, it can be useful in the evaluation of writing. (DI)