Sentence combining can teach students one of the most difficult aspects of the writing process--how to construct effective, versatile sentences. In sentence combining exercises, students take a series of short sentences and combine them into a longer and more elaborate sentence in such a way that the important information from each short sentence is retained. To help a less competent writer who might not combine the short sentences into the most effective sentence possible, signals such as underlining and connectives in parentheses may be inserted in the sentences. Sentence combining exercises can incorporate a wide variety of structures--noun modifiers, noun substitutes, and adverbials. Sentence combining succeeds because of its basis in students' oral language abilities, its independence of knowledge of grammatical terms, and students' enjoyment of sentence combining exercises. Although sentence combining is an effective technique, it is not a complete program for teaching writing, and should take no more than 15 minutes of class time per day. Such exercises can be drawn from a variety of sources other than commercial publishers. (HTH)