This paper describes some aspects of essays produced by students who as writers in the United States would commonly be called "basic writers." The paper focuses primarily on the grammatical subjects in these essays and offers a view of how closely grammatical structure typical in speech correspond to those typical in writing. It reports on the results of an in-class essay writing assignment given to basic writers in which the grammatical subject of the main clause was examined--in general, the subjects were short, and the writers did not use many complex syntactic structures in their subjects. The paper speculates about the challenges that such basic writers will probably face as they try to write academic discourse, especially discourse like that produced by writers in the sciences who work with a great deal of information that has been generated and stored up over time. Contains a table of data and 34 references. (NKA)