Using techniques of inference appraisal suggested by T. A. van Dijk and R. J. Sternberg, a study investigated whether by assigning particular writing tasks it would be possible to influence the way readers produce inferences about a text. Subjects, 52 ninth grade students, read especially prepared booklets and completed either a paraphrasing, comparing/contrasting, or question formulating writing task. Students in a nonwriting control group engaged in matching exercises. The effects of the different tasks were observed in students' subsequent writing on an assigned topic related to their reading and on a forced choice analogies test. The results showed that writing in conjunction with reading did affect inference production and that differential effects occurred across variant writing tasks. Results suggest that formulating questions in response to a text might result in more restrained discourse production in subsequent reading/writing tasks, and that writing in general may extend thinking involved in probing for the discovery of promising relationships in the solution of abstract problems. (FL)