This study is the eighth in a series of reports from the Reading-to-Write Project, a collaborative study of students' cognitive processes at one critical point of entry into academic performance. This report examines the initial reading strategies that a group of participating students used to begin a reading-to-write task and the impact of those strategies on the composing that follows. Subjects, 17 college freshmen (of a total of 72 participating either as controls or as experimental subjects), wrote essays, recorded their think-aloud protocols, and were interviewed concerning their reading and writing processes. Results indicated that students' history in school acts as a "legacy of literate behavior" in that the habits and assumptions from schooling appear as procedures for reading and writing and are evident in the opening moves by students to represent and translate a writing task into a draft. Results also indicated that students' opening moves often become a "legacy within the composition of a draft," but that they can begin to translate their immediate rhetorical situation into a more self-directed event by looking closely at the juncture between early comprehension and translation. (The Reading-to-Write study reference list is attached.) (RS)