Many secondary school English teachers have had no formal training in the teaching of writing and consequently equate written discourse with language propriety. This has been aggravated by the back to basics movement that has influenced secondary teaching across the country--especially as it has led to the development of legislation establishing standards for minimum competence to be determined through testing. Two kinds of testing appear to be widespread: standard achievement tests and performance examinations that test a student's ability to perform a specific task. Few of these tests require a writing sample, assuming that a student who can pass an objective test on usage, grammar, spelling, and mechanics is a good writer. This assumption ignores numerous studies showing that the study of grammar has a negligible effect on writing ability. The unversity has a stake in the improved writing of secondary students and might provide inservice workshops to forge closer ties with secondary teachers. One model is the Bay Area Writing Project, an extended workshop that requires teachers themselves to engage in the writing process. An alternative is a two-day presemester institute with sessions on sentence combining, strategies of invention and evaluation, error remediation, professional literature, peer criticism, and curriculum planning. (TJ)