The developmental writing program at Northern Virginia Community College, Manassas Campus, deals with three concerns common to developmental writing teachers at two-year colleges. First, since most developmental writing teachers are unable to empathize with, or understand, their students, the Manassas program begins with exercises which acquaint the teacher with student fears, angers, and apprehensions about writing. The second problem is that little has been done to make the vital distinction between remedial and developmental writing. The emphasis in the Manassas program is not on remedial work, but on the total development of students. Regularly scheduled, structured, small group experiences provide for work on goal setting, decision making, values clarification, and assessment of individual strengths. The final problem, the confusion of the teaching of grammar with the teaching of writing, is handled in the Manassas program by presenting students with a model of sentences, not an entire grammar. A surface-level treatment of transformational grammar is used as a basis for teaching sentence patterns. Appendixes to this paper provide initial exercises used in the program and topics for paragraph writing used to carry over the structured group experiences into the classroom. (GW)