The rhetorical inventions of Kenneth Burke can help writers gain new perspectives on their topics and can put new life into the process of learning to write. The pentad, Burke's instrument for interpreting actual and potential motives, can help develop lines of thought that might never occur without some such model. Other inventional systems such as exploring the limits of agreement with the thesis, finding the complex in the simple, expanding the circumference, and translation afford opportunities to make writing an adventure in words and ideas. The importance of Burke has two bases: he is the major spokesperson in the United States in our century for a rhetoric grounded in dialectic and he offers a way of getting beyond our narrow concern with linguistic style so that writing becomes action and a matter of interpreting motives rather than being a linguistic process for processing information. (TJ)