At Virginia State College, which has an open-admissions policy, entering freshmen who display serious weaknesses in writing are asked to attend a writing laboratory for two hours each week, in addition to attending their regular freshman writing classes. In the laboratory, students write a series of papers dealing with a particular subject. Teachers, working with students on an individual basis, help students concentrate their attention on a few serious writing problems, which they work on one or two at a time. Teachers distinguish between proofreading errors and errors due to misunderstandings, and they deal differently with the two types of errors. Research conducted in 1975 indicated that students in the writing laboratory made faster progress in reducing the percentage of errors in their writing than did students who were not enrolled in the laboratory. (Attachments to this paper present the results of the research and provide sample writing assignments for two series of papers. (GW)