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The present study investigated the effects of risk-taking on language learners' tendency to complexity or accuracy in descriptive and expository writing tasks. For this purpose, 185 EFL students took a TOEFL, wrote two compositions and filled out a risk-taking questionnaire. Out of this number, 118 subjects were almost at the same level of language proficiency. The researchers divided these subjects
into three subgroups of low, moderate and high risk-takers. Analysis of
Variance was used to investigate the relationship between risk-taking, syntactic complexity and grammatical accuracy in both writing tasks. The results did not show any significant relationship between risk¬taking, syntactic complexity and grammatical accuracy in the writing tasks. However, in both writing tasks low risk-takers tended to be more accurate than others. Moreover, the moderate and high risk-takers tended to write more complicated structures than the low risk-takers. The findings have some implications for language pedagogy and testing.