Based on the premise that teaching basic writing involves first understanding what tends to go wrong when students write, a computer assisted system of error prediction and analysis was designed to improve college students' writing skills in both English and French. Students were to complete a sequenced series of writing assignments first in English, then in French. To determine the relationship between English and French errors, error data would be collected, classified, recorded on code sheets, and interpreted through a specially designed computer program. Findings from the error analysis would then be used to review syntactic and grammatical problem areas with a second class prior to making their writing assignments, with the hope that such errors would decrease for this group of students. If effective, a similar error analysis design could be used in two other areas of study: English as a second language and business. (AEA)