Many learning disabled secondary school students have difficulties with text organization in both subject area reading and expository writing. Problems may include difficulty in following the main ideas in text, recognizing the main text topics and their interrelationships, or recognizing the subordinate and superordinate ideas and examples. Often, recall ability is poor and writing skills are inadequate. Several concepts derived from current theories and research in text processing can provide a guide for the improvement of instruction in both reading and writing for learning disabled secondary school students. The microstructure model of text comprehension allows students to transform sentences into their underlying microstructure propositions which express the surface structure information of the passage. Research on the skills involved in summarizing a text has shown that an important aspect of text processing involves the ability to identify main topics of the text and their interrelatedness. Another line of research has emphasized the central role of topic structure processing in reading and writing. Text structure or organization has been found to have a major role in the recognition and recall of main ideas in text. Research has also indicated that the recognition and use of objective textual cues to the relevant information in a text contributes to the identification of the important ideas and their interrelatedness. Instructional programs based on these concepts have the potential for improving both the comprehension and recall of expository material and the quality of expository writing for learning disabled secondary students, thus enhancing their opportunities for success in academic settings. A list of 31 references is appended. (CB)