All middle school students, in grades 6 through 8, must develop well-written compositions. According to the Louisiana Department of Education (2008), to meet the requirements of the comprehensive curriculum, these students must write complex, multi-paragraph compositions with a clearly focused main idea and developed with ideas, models of relevant organization and structure that communicates. clearly to the reader. Grade-level expectations also state that students should use a variety of sentence structures, voices, and word choices to meet audience expectations, as well as appropriate grammar and mechanics. In addition to being able to communicate effectively in written form in their curriculum, middle school students must demonstrate their writing abilities by writing a composition in response to a prompt, a lecture, or a narrative in various forms, on the assessment standardized statewide, LEAP for eighth grade or iLEAP for sixth and seventh grade, in the spring of each year. These compositions are graded according to a rubric in four areas: selected vocabulary, selected information, sentence diversity, tone and voice. In order to achieve maximum marks, students must have, among other things, consistent control in all of these areas with appropriate and relevant word choices, vivid and powerful verbs and stylistic techniques, with relevant and tailored information to the audience, with a variety of phrases, and with a clear, vibrant tone and voice that engages the audience. (Louisiana Department of Education, 2008). Researchers at the University of Kansas Institute for Research on Learning (Schumacker & Deschler, 2009), writing about the demands of writing for students, stated: "depending on their...... middle of paper ......nts with learning disabilities. Learning Disabilities: A Contemporary Journal 5(1), 77-93.Louisiana Department of Education. Retrieved October 21, 1010 from http://www.doe.state.la.us/lde/saa/1915.htmlLouisiana Department of Education. Retrieved October 21, 1010 from http://www.doe.state.la.us/lde/uploads/14851.pdfMason, L., and Graham, S. (2008). Writing instruction for adolescents with learning disabilities: Intervention research programs. Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, 23(2), 103-112. Saddler, B and Asaro-Saddler, K. (2010). Writing Better Sentences: Teaching Sentence Combining in the Classroom. Preventing Academic Failure, 54(3), 159-163. Schumaker, JB and Deshler, D.D. (2009). Adolescents with learning disabilities as writers: are we selling them short? Research and practice on learning disabilities, 24(2), 81-92.