Combining concepts of cognitive theory with those of rhetoric and linguistics can help writing teachers understand the kinds of activities that will enable basic writers to produce syntactic constructions appropriate for the content they have generated. A review of research studies of sentence combining, syntactic constructions, grammatical chunking, and other transformational theories demonstrates the necessity for understanding the input of short-term memory on language-processing activities. After determining that a student in fact has difficulty with a particular transformation, such as infinitive phrases, increasingly complex appropriate exercises can be designed so the student can reconstruct them correctly and eventually rewrite previously written papers using that transformational structure. The intent of such sequenced activities is to accustom students to using sophisticated syntactic patterns without averting their attention from the content of their writing. Teaching the process of revision becomes easier when inexperienced writers understand that short-term memory limits their ability to convey full meaning in a first draft, and the ability to "chunk" sophisticated syntactic structures can help them hold more content in memory while writing down their thoughts. Language-processing activities should be designed to make language a tool that serves content. (AEA)