A substantial amount of literature in education and psychology supports the notion that reading combined with writing enhances comprehension and recall. To investigate how various writing tasks affect thinking, a pilot study was conducted, which produced results consistent with the hypothesis that text engagement (student interaction with written material) would occur to the extent that various writing tasks required reorganizing the language of the text. In a study undertaken to reproduce these results with a larger group, 176 high school students were assigned to four groups--three were given writing tasks (formulating questions, comparing and contrasting, and paraphrasing) to follow their reading and one was given a nonwriting task (a matching exercise). Students' written recall of the assigned reading was analyzed to compare the extent to which the inference operations--generalization, integration, deletion, and construction--were instigated by the various reading/study tasks. The results indicated that the students who formulated questions and wrote compare-contrast statements generated more information than those who paraphrased and performed the matching exercise; and that the students who formulated questions produced more constructions than any group and restated relatively more top level information. These results indicate that writing tasks requiring reorganization of texts (formulating questions and comparing-contrasting) tend to engage more of the students' own intellectual resources in the study of those texts. (References, tables of results, and appendixes--the target text, test booklets, scoring sheet, and examples of student recalls--are included.) (LLZ)