Offered as an introductory guide to teachers interested in approaching written English as a "second dialect" that students must master, this review covers quantitative investigations of written language. The first section deals with developmental studies, describing how a variety of researchers have related written structure to writer maturity. Included, among others, are such major works as M. Stormzand and M. O'Shea's 1924 analysis of 10,000 sentences from the writing of students, adults, and professional writers and Walter Loban's longitudinal study, "The Language of Elementary School Children." Research based on the ideas of Noam Chomsky, Kellogg Hunt, and Francis Christensen is also covered. The second section discusses the inherently difficult task of investigating the determiners of quality in composition. Studies by Robert Potter and Margaret Ashida are described in some detail. In the final section, attempts to create computer assessment of student writing are described. (JL)