A study investigated how children's writing reflects the syntactic complexity, style, and format of their basal readers. Subjects were 116 students drawn from 10 second, third, and fourth grade classrooms in two different schools located near Boston, Massachusetts. A matched group design was used, and students using a form of the "Ginn" basal series were matched with those using a form of the "Open Court" series. The various texts were analyzed for number of words per selection, t-units per selection, words per t-unit, and clauses per t-unit. Students' linguistic and comprehension abilities were assessed, as well as their knowledge of literature. They completed three writing exercises in response to different stimuli. Results indicated that the readers had a strong impact on children's writing. Those children using the "Open Court" series, which contained more elaborate structures than the "Ginn" series, tended to use more linguistically complex sentence structures, such as subordinate clauses, in their own writing. In addition, children in both groups tended to use the style and format of their basals as models for their writing. The findings suggest that publishers need to face the problem of writing texts that facilitate children's learning to decode words while at the same time providing adequate models of written English. (FL)