The insight and understanding gained from various discourse models can allow teachers of reading and writing to focus on the many ways reading and writing instruction can be integrated. For example, syntactically oriented writing exercises such as sentence combining and Francis Christensen's generative rhetoric of a sentence can assist students in the effective writing of sentences and paragraphs, and can be applied to the reading process so that students can become analytical readers of complex sentences and paragraphs. Christensen's rhetoric of sentences and paragraphs allows student-writers the possibility of learning to see and create relationships within and between sentences. Sentence combining, on the other hand, allows students to manipulate sentence structures in order to compose more syntactically mature sentences. One useful approach to analyzing complex sentences is to have students practice sentence-combining in reverse; the breaking down of sentences into parts. Another approach is to teach students to understand how Christensen's free modifiers function and how they may function on various levels of a sentence, depending on their structural functions. (HOD)