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.Although a large portion of the writing students do in school is about literature (Applebee, 1978), we know little about what these writing experiences contribute to literary understanding. From recent studies of instruction, however, we do know that school reading and writing tasks tend to be limited and limiting largely because of an academic tradition that tends to stress knowing "the facts" rather than exploring personal meaning (Langer, 1984). Applebee's (1981Applebee's ( , 1984) studies of secondary school writing indicate that typically teachers assign writing to assess rather than to encourage various responses to text, and that, for the most part, when writing is assigned students must work within preset forms that may short-circuit rather than extend learning.From another perspective, large scale studies of reading and responding to 37 38 Journal of Reading Behaviorliterature (Purves, 1981) suggest that students learn "academic" responses that are primarily concerned with content rather than personal point of view. Consequently, as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (1981) has pointed out, students of all ages can comprehend literary text and evaluate their responses to it, but they have difficulty explaining and elaborating those responses. "Students in all age groups might not be getting opportunities to engage in the extended discourse . . . that teaches them to explain and substantiate their inferences in the most basic ways" (p. 24). Taken together, these studies present a rather disturbing picture of the contexts in which students are asked to write about content-area information as well as literary text. To a large extent, research has been remarkably slow to examine the ways writing might foster reasoning and learning. Such a research agenda would seem valuable if we are to understand what students take from the writing tasks we assign as part of their literary education.Writing about literature can be either an endpoint that tests for a specific form of response or a point of departure for exploring and elaborating on students' responses to literature. Since both approaches can be appropriate given the purposes of instruction, the question at issue here is what kinds of reasoning and thinking about literary texts ...