A re-analysis of data from a previous study was undertaken to determine if student essays catagorized as dealing with group-phenomenon events differed in quality and syntactic complexity from essays categorized as dealing with individually experienced events. The essays of 44 college freshmen in basic writing classes were catagorized as dealing either with incidents experienced by several students (intensification) or with an incident experienced only by the individual student (initiation). Raters scored the essays for topic-type, quality, and syntactic complexity. Results revealed that the students produced 10 intensification and 33 initiation essays, with the intensification essays receiving significantly lower quality scores than the initiation essays. The intensification papers, however, contained more words per clause than the initiation papers. The findings suggest that the intensification topic-type resulted in "syntactic confusion" rather than syntactic maturity. (Excepts from both types of essays are included in the paper.) (FL)