A study was conducted to determine whether students comprehend student-authored material more easily than the material of published authors. The Fry Readability Graph was used to estimate the readability of 8 published passages of 200-270 words, which varied from grade 5 through grade 10. The topic of each passage was listed and used in a 2-day writing exercise in seventeen 10th-grade English classrooms. The student-written passages were grouped according to topic, and eight were randomly selected and paired with published passages. Sixteen cloze tests were constructed from the samples: eight student written and eight published passages. Each student completed the tests in one pair, with no students completing a cloze test for the student-authored and published passage of the same content. A t-test was used to determine the significance of student comprehension scores. The results indicated that there was little difference between mean cloze scores for the student-authored versus published passages. The mean cloze score for the student written passages was only slightly higher than the mean cloze score for the published passages. (Appendixes contain the instructions for the student writers, a sample of the student content information sheet, and a sample of the cloze tests.) (HTH)