This document traces the history of sentence combining, from Ney's study in 1966 and Mellon's study in 1969 to recent research conducted by Ney and supported by the Research Foundation of the National Council of Teachers of English. Studies by O'Hare (1973), Ney (1975), Combs (1975), Perron (1974), Green (1972), Hunt and O'Donnell (1969), Miller and Ney (1968), and Vitale and others (1971) have found that instruction in sentence combining did have a positive effect on students' ability to write sentences of the kind practiced. Studies by Stedman (1971), Thomas (1975), and Hughes (1975) have found that sentence combining significantly helps students to read, while Combs (1975) and Ney (1976) have not been able to find an improvement in reading on the part of their experimental groups. Differences of method in sentence combining research include use of signaled rather than free sentence combining exercises, variation in the number of sentences to be combined, and addition of oral exercises to the written exercises. Ney has also experimented with game techniques joined with sentence combining (1976) in a study in which the experimental group did not show significant gains over the control group. It is the belief of the researcher that sentence combining should be an important part of the elementary school curriculum for short periods of time daily while the value of sentence combining instruction at the college level has not yet been determined. (MKM)