A study researched the differential uses readers make of analogic and visual prompts for understanding and remembering complex prose. Fifty-two eleventh grade students with average and above average reading ability enrolled in a comprehensive high school in central Georgia participated in the study. They were ranked according to their ability to learn from reading and assigned to one of four groups, which corresponded to guide material that was different for each treatment condition. The reading material described the game of cricket, but two of the guides provided analogies between cricket and baseball and two provided diagrams. The study was done in two phases: in phase one the students read the material, completed the study guide, and took a 20-item sentence completion test on the game of cricket; in phase two the students took the same test again at a later time. Mean averages and standard deviations were computed for each treatment group's immediate and delayed test results. Both analogies and diagrams contributed substantially to the students' initial understanding of the material, but the delayed test showed that the analogy groups retained their understanding better and longer. Providing readers with visual aids to prompt initial integration of novel information and analogies to help them retain it stands as a theoretically defensible teaching practice supported by the finding of this and other related investigations. (SRT)