Students in a course on the psychology of language and thought first wrote flash fiction stories and analyzed them using course concepts. As an experiential learning exercise, they subsequently analyzed those stories for a number of psycholinguistic variables using the discourse technology Coh-Metrix. Their assignment was to change a number of specific variables by at least one standard deviation. The assignment proved challenging to students and was subsequently revised. Evidence--from anonymous student surveys, focus groups, end-of-semester course evaluations, and performance on the assignment itself--suggests that students gained an intuitive feel for psycholinguistic concepts and this emerging discourse technology.