A teacher describes his unexpected success with a technique designed to help special needs ninth graders acquire writing and spelling skills. Assisted by his teaching aide, he used a dictation exercise coupled with immediate feedback and touch. He found that dictating sentences helped students make transitions betweens talking and writing. The approach expanded into grammar, punctuation, and capitalization. The grammar is used only as a way to solve usage problems. The paper concludes by noting possible problems in using the approach (chiefly, too many students and no aide). (CL)