The present study reports on exploratory research to determine whether the Aluminum Paragraph, a sentence-combining exercise developed by O'Donnell (Hunt, 1970) to measure the development of syntactic complexity in the writing of native speakers of English, can also serve as a measure of the active syntactic proficiency of learners of English as a second language. Performance by a group of learners of English as a second language is compared with available normative data for native speakers and with subscores made by the subjects on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). The low correlation between performance on the English Structure section of TOEFL and on the exercise, seems to indicate that recognition of correct grammatical structure is not always accompanied by proficiency in writing. A definitive judgment about the effectiveness of the rewriting exercise cannot be made. Appendices contain: a) the Aluminum Paragraph; b) a synopsis of performance on the exercise; and c) Spearman rank correlation coefficients of performance. (Author/AM)