This experiment was aimed at discovering how well a heterogeneous sample of subjects can reconstruct English text when various amounts of it have been deleted. Thirteen prose passages, differing widely in content and style, were selected for test. Deletions were made in both regular and random patterns and in 6 amounts varying from 10% to 67%. Ninety-one subjects, varying widely in general intelligence and familiarity with grammar, were used in the study. Five of the subjects were naval code experts. The subjects were instructed to reconstruct the original passage from the material presented. The results show that: (1) The amount of material which can be correctly restored drops off very rapidly as more and more text is deleted. In general, the typical subject cannot recover very much material. When 25% of the text has been deleted, only about 70% of it is recovered. When 50% of the text has been deleted, only about 10% can be recovered. There are, however, wide individual differences in this respect. (2) When the amount of deletion is 25% or less it is more difficult to reconstruct randomly-deleted passages than those which were deleted in a regular pattern. When the amount of deleted material exceeds 33%, randomly-deleted passages are easier to reconstruct. (3) Most subjects were not able to add very much beyond the content supplied them. (4) There are sizeable differences between passages in the ease with which they can be reconstructed. In general, passages which are easy to reconstruct are not necessarily those which are easiest to read according to conventional readability criteria. (5) As a group, the code experts did considerably better than the median subject. Even they, however, were not able to reconstruct very much material when the amount of deletion was 50% or greater. The code experts do not perform better than subjects who match them in general verbal and mental ability. (6) The ability to reconstruct passages in this experiment correlates highly with scores on the Wonderlic Personnel Test and Cooperative English Test(r''s range from .63 to .68).