In this article, we discuss the role of one-zone drawing followed by annealing in enhancing the structure and properties of fibers manufactured from Fortron (R) linear poly(phenylene sulfide) resins. The interaction effects of the polymer molecular weight (MW), melt-spinning process parameters, and draw-annealing process conditions were also elucidated. Several tools used to probe the investigation were tensile testing, differential scanning calorimetry, polarized light optical microscopy, wide-angle X-ray scattering, and small-angle X-ray scattering. This study showed that the optimum drawing temperature was around 95 degrees C. A considerable improvement in the fiber tensile properties was observed upon drawing and annealing under optimum processing conditions. Fibers with tenacities close to 5 g/den were obtained. The development of the tensile properties was statistically correlated with the morphological changes in the fibers. The routes to achieving fibers with optimum tensile properties were shown to be different for resins with different MWs. (c) 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2012