Judging student writing is a difficult, time consuming task for both the classroom teacher and the researcher. Criteria of excellence for compositions remain ill-defined. This study is designed to define some easily measurable syntactic and semantic cues within student essays that predict and perhaps determine readers' responses, thereby facilitating the evaluators' task. In searching for the covert, quantifiable written cues that correlate with reader response, we rely on frequency counts to, as Braddock advises in Research in Written Composition, discover certain key situations which are indices of larger areas of (21) . Our larger area of concern consists of defining the basis for, or at least some predictors of, reader response.