A study conducted to determine if speaking activities facilitated growth in writing involved approximately 60 community college students enrolled in freshman composition. A review of the literature supported the notions that a definite relationship exists between talking and writing, that prewriting activities affect the quality of composition, and that dyadic communication offers the optimum opportunity for using oral language skills to strengthen writing. The study design included pretested experimental and control groups, with the experimental group experiencing 35-40 minutes of paired conversation prior to out-of-class writing. The students produced four sets of essays written in the traditional rhetorical modes sequence of description, narration, exposition, and argument that were rated for general merit and mechanics. Results of the study indicated that using speaking as a prewriting activity produced positive effects for assignments composed in each of the discourse modes: for description, in mechanics; for narration and exposition, in general merit and total evaluation; and for argumentation, in all three--mechanics, general merit, and total evaluation. (An extensive bibliography is appended.) (AEA)