In the last few years, a rhetoric of inquiry has emerged to complement the rhetoric of the finished word. New interest in the "pre-writing" activities--e.g., audience analysis, concept formation, and the discovery of judgments which order and give meaning to experience--has manifested itself both in research into the nature of these activities and in the development of heuristic procedures to carry out these activities more efficiently. However, recent research has ignored the motivation for engaging in pre-writing activities. The very earliest stages of the writing process actually begin as the writer discovers that he is psychologically uncomfortable about some violation to his image of the world and wished to resolve the difficulty. He then analyzes and articulates the opposing components of his image, describes its origins, and specifies, in the form of a question, what he believes will resolve the inconsistency or eliminate the problem which is, at the outset, unknown to him. Because problems are important incentives to action, writing instruction should teach not only the nature and articulation of problems, but also should sharpen the student's awareness of his own cognitive life and encourage him to believe that events in it are appropriate subjects for investigation. (JB)