Tagmemic invention offers a student several ways of decreasing the unfamiliarity of the early stages of writing. The process of inquiry and the heuristic devices provide the orientation and tools for dealing with new writing tasks with increased confidence and likelihood of success. In the theory of tagmemic rhetoric, language behavior and problem-solving activity are held to be features recurrent in all writing, and tagmemic invention makes use of this theory by illuminating one's own writing habits for possible alteration and by increasing the efficiency of one's own inventional skills. The theory is loosely segmented into four stages of inquiry: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. There are three inventional heuristic categories: strategies for the analysis and articulation of problems, the systematic exploration of a subject, and the testing of a solution for its soundness. Formal testing of tagmemic invention in the classroom has confirmed that it develops students' inventional skills with benefits to the overall quality of their writing. Through the use of heuristics as a means of intervening productively at crucial stages in the writing process, students can learn to enhance their natural writing capacities. (DF)