Comparing FYC students at the beginning and the ending of their first-year study to the MICUSP undergrads and the COCAA writers, we notice a distinctive shift:

Table 1: Comparison of one clause-initial syntactic strategy Feature per 1000 words

	FYC (beginning)	FYC (ending)	MICUSP (undergrad)	COCA (academic)
Theme ideational interpersonal textual	46.92 3.10 13.85	34.09 1.57 10.39	26.24 0.49 9.34	19.62 0.40 6.83

We can find similar shifts studying the clause-final structures (rhemes), illustrating that the more experienced writers develop a diversity of syntactic patterns to control theme and focus. However, the numbers do not reveal the whole story.