This paper reviews how various nonstandard dialects of English may influence written products and how writing may be taught to speakers of such dialects. Sections of the literature review focus on the speech patterns of black English, of other English dialects, and of other languages, and on how these patterns manifest themselves in written English. Other sections of the paper discuss comparisons of common error patterns across dialects, the arguments for and against students' right to their own language (the bidialectic approach), and suggestions for teaching English to students who do not speak standard English. The approaches to writing instruction that are suggested include (1) ignoring dialect influences and focusing instead on the writing process, on the rhetorical situation, and on the goals of writing; (2) including instruction on dialects in the composition curriculum, noting their appropriate use in certain kinds of writing, such as personal letters; (3) advocating the use of English-as-a-second-language techniques to help remove dialect influences on writing; and (4) combining the approaches in an eclectic manner that reflects the variety of students and their linguistic differences. (RL)