WRITING TEACHER'S ADVICE to students searching for material has generally included two elements: an ascesis, to render the student well-disposed in his or her search, and a set of questions to generate information. Conventionally, both the ascesis and the set of questions have been primitive. The student was occasionally instructed to find a topic that was interesting to him or her (as if that weren't half the problem), look in his or her heart, and write, but more often, urged to compose a thesis sentence and make good use of the research tools in the university library. XVith the revival of the study of rhetoric, the concept of invention has been treated more systematically: associational exercises, rules of thumb for developing material, and systematic procedures of inquiry, under the topic of pre-writing, form a healthy chunk of most writing textbooks. Further, students are often taught a systematic procedure for uncovering new information, a procedure that encourages a certain attitude of inquiry in the student: Burke's pentad, Aristotelean topics-or some abbreviation of them-, or the discovery procedures of the Michigan tagmemicists. The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze some popular heuristic forms, with a view to establishing their continuity with the dominating tradition of Anglo-American empiricism and its associated mental stance of contemplativeness. Let us first survey the terrain. One striking feature of modern invention procedures is the separation and hypertrophy of the basic elements. Macrorie, for example, concentrates on ascesis: the student's search for his own voice is a sort of initiation to mature writing, attained through the disciplines of the journal, peer evaluation, and unrelenting honesty. This ascesis, of course, implies a set of questions: How did it feel? and How, exactly did it effect you, visually, sensually? These questions, in fact, appear in Telling Writing, where they constitute the forinstance, the realized image which is the mark of good writing.1 Conversely, the hypertrophied set of questions in the tagmemic matrix, which asks students to analyze events as waves, particles, and fields and in terms of contrast, variation, and distribution, is also an ascesis intended to encourage the formation of working hypotheses.2