The increase in adult college students who have been away from formal education for several years and who are seeking degrees to match the status level they have achieved in business requires a specially organized composition course. Two strategies will keep the course organization and content professional, yet meet individual students' needs in grammar and mechanics without frustration or embarrassment. The first strategy is the use of the syllabus as an advance organizer, allowing mature control of study time and flexibility for making up work from unavoidable absences. The second involves an analysis of the course and incorporates eight levels of learning. Level one, signal learning, deals with adults' conditioned responses to school in general and composition in particular. The second level, stimulus/response learning, is positive reinforcement for adult writing efforts. The third and fourth levels are chaining, a sequence of learned responses often no longer contiguous in older students. The fifth level, multiple discrimination learning, deals with varying approaches to organizing ideas, while the sixth, concept discrimination, stresses concept similarities such as metaphors and analogies. The acquisition of structure rules in writing comprises the seventh level, and the eighth level, problem solving, involves knowing the rules so well that one knows when to break them. Use of these strategies can help the composition teacher become more sensitive to the needs of adult students. (HTH)