This study examined how personal versus formal writing tasks affect what students take from literary text. The writing samples produced by sixty-five 10th-grade students in response to two short stories were analyzed for quality of response, audience, function, syntactic complexity, fluency, and types of response statements. Findings indicated that the reader-based or personal writing tasks enabled the students to produce qualitatively more effective responses that tended to be more fluent and constructed with a wider range of response statements. A shift in audience from teacher-as-examiner to teacher-student dialogue in the personal writing indicated a tentativeness that permitted the students to invite their reader into their explorations of the short stories.
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