Short essays written by 60 secon d and third grade children were analyzed in order to compare the global quality with the syntactic maturity contained therein. Global quality is a broad measure of the level of ability and development evidenced by the pupil in his particular writing. Syntactic maturity is a measure based on the existence of various syntactical structures in the writing. Considered in this study were (1) the number of T-units (minimal terminable syntactic units), (2) the mean T-unit length, (3) the number of subordinate clauses, and (4) the number of all clauses. High correlations were found between global quality measures and the number of T-units, the ratio of the clauses per T-unit, the number of subordinate clauses, and the number of all clauses. These results indicate that fluency and complexity are related to quality in the written compositions of these students. Further research is needed. A bibliography and statistical tables are included. (WD)