A study investigated the effects of writing in a personal and a formal mode on students' understanding of literary text. Formal text-based and personal reader-based writing samples produced by 65 tenth grade students in response to two stories from D. Sohn's "Ten Modern American 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 than were the formal responses. Thus, in spite of their limited experience in analytic writing, the students were capable of a variety of approaches to literature. 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. Though the two approaches were not mutually exclusive, students took different experiences from them. The results suggest that writing can be used as an effective tool for understanding literary texts. (Tables of data are included and the evaluation scale and definitions and examples of literary response statements are appended.) (JD)