An accurate treatment of radiative transfer is used to explore the effects of grain scattering properties on the photoionization and photodissociation efficiencies of atomic and molecular constituents in diffuse clouds and to calculate the rates of heat deposition by photoelectric emission from grains. The observational data on ionization and dissociation are consistent with, but do not establish, a grain scattering model which is highly anisotropic at short wavelengths.