The Effects of Writing in a Reader-Based and Text-Based Mode on Students' Understanding of Two Short Stories

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...