In an investigation of the effect of instruction in five components of the writing process on the syntactic complexity and the writing quality of high school students, 48 students received instruction in the following areas: discovering a subject, creating a design, developing a sense of audience, learning to use specifics, and learning to rewrite. Instruction covered a one-semester period. One week was devoted to pretesting, which drew three completed samples of writing on an assigned topic from each student--one sample a rewrite. Another week of posttesting produced three more completed writing samples on an assigned topic from each student--one of which was a rewrite. In addition, a standardized writing test was administered. Two weeks were devoted to instruction in each of the components, and writing samples were obtained from each student at the end of each instruction unit. All of the samples were analyzed for syntactic complexity by calculating the total number of words for each, while teacher/raters evaluated the samples for writing quality. The results showed that instruction in all five components of the writing process succeeded in developing the writing skills of the students in the study as judged by quality analysis and by syntactic complexity scores. (FL)