A study was designed to discover whether readers use simple story grammar categories (setting, beginning, development, and conclusion) to organize the propositions of a story. Nineteen proficient readers were given a list of randomly ordered propositions that made up a simple story structure. Each reader was instructed to group the propositions into a set of categories. The category sorts obtained from the readers were compared, through the use of Target Partition Analysis, to the categories that J. Mandler and N. Johnson used to outline a prototypical story structure. The results indicated that readers initially ordered the propositions correctly but did not group them into the target categories. The largest discrepancies occurred in the placement of the beginning and development propositions. These results indicated that the prototypical story structures outlined in recent story grammars do not conform to the schema that many readers hold for a typical simple story. (Author/RL)