This paper reports the results of a study in which the following issues were addressed: (1) whether there is a strong relationship between syntactic enhancement, as measured by Davidson's Test of Ability to Subordinate (TAS), and overall writing ability; (2) whether a subordination test has any predictive ability for attained writing proficiency; (3) whether this subordination test has any concurrent validity; and (4) whether different scoring methods affect the correlation coefficient. A section of 14 adult students in a freshman composition course for foreign students was used for this study. At the beginning of the term, the students were given the TAS, which requires students to combine two or three sentences in a single sentence frame. At the end of the term the TAS was again administered as a post-test and a writing sample was collected from all students. The compositions were marked according to the holistic, the analytic, and the error-count methods. For this particular subject pool, there was no significant correlation between syntactic enhancement and overall writing ability. However the TAS seemed to have predictive validity; the holistic scores and analytical scores correlated significantly with most other variables; and the TAS did not seem to exhibit concurrent validity. (AMH)