A remedial-English pilot program for college freshmen yielded four major observations about basic writers: they are poor readers, their level of syntactic maturity is low, their writing is riddled with errors, and the strategies they use in their writing often work against them to compound their difficulties. Among the conclusions drawn from these observations and from the program results are that reading and writing instruction should be united in the remedial classroom, that the tendency of some remedial programs to reduce the reading level of all materials to a low level may actually deter students from expanding their current capacities, that available sentence-combining exercises and other exercises designed to foster syntactic growth must be carefully redesigned for basic-writing students, and that basic-writing students can improve measurably in basic-skill areas if focus is directed toward meeting their individual needs. (GW)