Twenty linguistic features found in essays of Creole-speaking students taking remedial writing courses at Hunter College are discussed and illustrated. The students spoke a creole or post-creole language as their mother tongue. The language varieties, which are those most frequently encountered in East Coast urban centers from Boston to Miami, are either Haitian Creole French or the following varieties of creole or post-creole English: American Black English vernacular (BEV), Gullah, Bahamian, Belizean, Jamaican, Trinidadian, and Guyanese. While the vocabulary and certain other features of these varieties vary considerably, they share many structural features influenced by African languages that cause similar kinds of interference in acquiring standard English. To illustrate these features and their origin, reference is made to parallel sentences in Yoruba (a Nigerian language), Haitian Creole French, and BEV or other English-based varieties. The examples illustrate lack of subject-verb agreement, the absence of the "-ed" or suppletive form of the past tense and the past participle, inappropriate use of the present perfect tense, different words used for the verb "be," treating adjectives as verbs, unusual features of the noun phrase, and unusual word order. In addition to syntactical divergences, examples of interference at the lexical level are provided. It is concluded that creole-speaking students' problems in writing standard English arise from conflicting community norms rather than from any individual language deficiency. (SW)