Prepared as part of a project designed to provide an objectively measured indication of the quality of student writing in one school district, this paper presents analyses of the syntactic complexity of the argumentative and narrative writing of more than 500 seventh and eighth grade students and of the mechanical errors found in that writing. Various sections of the paper contain (1) a description of the student sample and the study methodology; (2) detailed analyses of the syntactic complexity of the writing as measured by T-unit analysis; (3) an analysis of the basic writing skills of the students as measured by a count of errors in spelling, punctuation, pronoun usage, adverb usage, modifier usage, parallel construction, and subject-verb agreement; (4) an account of a rhetorical analysis of a subsample of the student writing; (5) a report on the correlations found between the various sets of scores; and (6) a discussion of the results of the analyses, which revealed extraordinarily high syntactic complexity scores for the students, especially in the argumentative mode, and extremely low levels of mechanical errors. Appendixes contain copies of scoring sheets and student essays. (FL)