The descriptive writing abilities of 15 subjects with Alzheimer's disease (AD) of mild to moderate severity were compared with 15 age- and sex-matched normal controls. Sixteen features of written linguistic ability were analyzed. AD subjects wrote shorter descriptive paragraphs than normal elderly subjects. Features related to letter or spelling errors and content words were found to be significantly different between the two groups, whereas functor word errors and number of attempted corrections did not significantly differ between the two groups.