Going beyond mere grammaticality, this book examines the basic writing skills of a group of community college students in Hawaii for errors in idiomaticity, or native-like appropriateness of expression. The book suggests criteria for the classification of "phrasematic" expressions, and a convenient terminology comprising idioms, collocations, and formulas is developed. It contends that increased attention to idiomaticity is required, not only in language description, but also in the academic writing of second language and creole speakers. The book is based on a study of 113 papers written by 67 students enrolled in four basic (remedial) writing classes at Kapiolani Community College in Honolulu; the papers were collected and analyzed for sentences that were unacceptable to academic writing, after which the unacceptable sentences were sorted according to types of errors they contained, using a list of categories tentatively drawn from the available literature on formulas, idioms, and idiomaticity. Contains an extensive bibliography. (NKA)