Freshman composition students were given six assignments designed to help them examine, analyze, and put their memories into context so that the students could use their memories to begin exploring and creating their own "truths" through language. Two essential types of memory were identified: (1) natural memory, memorizing word for word, which led to the sort of narrative account that the first-semester freshmen tended to write; and (2) artificial memory, which involved memorizing notions and images, then organizing them into cognitive schemata, thus encouraging more analytical writing. These two forms of memory proved interdependent, and the students needed to be aware of that. Effective writers used both forms of memory by cataloguing personal images with the one and analyzing, separating, and schematizing them with the other. Memory retrieval emerged as a crucial part of the process and appeared to be strongly related to stylistic production. Image retrieval seemed to be based not only on writers' knowledge of their ownership of the two types of memory and their ability to store both image and words, but also ultimately on their ability to transform the image into language. Style was stressed as an agent and inducer of memory, and students were encouraged to regard memory as an essential part of the inventive process. (Descriptions of six writing assignments are attached.) (AEW)