Reading ability is a major factor in the ability to solve story problems in arithmetic (Ballew & Cunningham, 1982; Cottrell, 1968; Harvin & Gilchrist, 1970; Linville, 1970; Martin, 1964; Murray, 1949). Several arithmetic textbook series (Eicholz, O'Daffer, & Fleenor, 1978; Wells, Yacono, Abbot, & Spence, 1978) have attempted to reduce problem difficulty by using a format in which the verbiage is reduced: 6 bags. 5 carrots in each. How many carrots in all? (Wells et al., 1978, Grade 4, p. 133) The effect of a telegraphic format on problem difficulty appears not to have been studied. Problem length was examined in several regression studies summarized by Barnett (1980), but problem context and mathematical structure were not held constant. Zweng (1979) used versions of story problems as hints for students who could not solve the full-sentence version. She found that the low verbal versions helped high ability students only. She hypothesized that the hints helped by forcing a second reading of the problem, which benefited good problem solvers more than poor problem solvers. She did not compare the different versions of the problems. The telegraphic format may help students by stripping the problem of unnecessary information so that less working memory is required to extract the essential information from its context (Case, 1978). Since sentence meaning is encoded without much syntactical information (Bransford & Franks, 1971), one could also argue that the telegraphic format may correspond more closely to the child's own way of coding sentence meaning. Further, some children may be poor problem solvers because so much of their working memory is devoted to decoding, interpreting, and recoding the problem information presented in a verbose format that not enough working memory is available to solve the problem. They have not sufficiently overlearned the schemata needed for reading and interpreting the problem (Pascual-Leone, 1970).