The purpose of this monograph is to provide a basic discussion of the general nature of syntactic complexity. The monograph describes how the rules of language produce syntax and raises some questions about reading difficulty. The contents include: "Arrangement," which discusses 12 basic sentence types, noun determiners, verb expansions, negative expansions, adverbial expansions, and intensifier expansions; "Rearrangement," which looks at yes or no questions, passive sentences, irregular word order, and reordering word order; "Addition," which discusses coordinating conjunctions, adverbial function, relative clauses, present and past participle phrases, a caution about participles and adjectives, absolute constructions, possessives, noun phrases, and multiple additions;"Deletion," which looks at imperative sentences, passive sentences, deletion of identical elements to form a series, and verb phrases; "Substitutions," which discusses vocabulary, pronouns, noun phrase substitutions, and the verb "do"; "Agreement," which discusses grammatical agreement and metaphors; "Easy to Read Syntax," which looks at oversimplistic syntax; "Applications," which discusses application activities that measure some aspects of syntactic complexity; and "Summary." (WR)