The ways speakers of Black English modify features of their spoken dialect in the process of adapting their language to writing are examined in this dissertation, on the basis of a corpus of writing from 41 black students enrolled in a St. Louis community college composition course. Each student is represented by 500 to 1000 words of writing selected for their reflection of features identified by researchers as characteristic of Black English. The study reveals that the conventions of writing force the dialect features to undergo regular changes, though the dialect remains as an identifiable pattern. English spelling conventions and the discrete nature of written words force a rearrangement of the constraints controlling the dialect variables in spoken Black English. (Author/AA)