From Intention to Text: AI-Supported Goal Setting in Academic Writing

TL;DR

WriteFlow is an AI voice-based assistant that enhances reflective academic writing by supporting goal articulation, monitoring, and negotiation through dialogic interaction, fostering metacognition and writer agency.

Contribution

This paper introduces WriteFlow, a novel AI system that emphasizes reflective dialogue and goal management to support academic writers' metacognitive processes.

Findings

WriteFlow scaffolds metacognitive regulation and reflection-in-action.

It supports iterative goal refinement and goal-text alignment.

It prompts evaluation of goal fulfillment during writing.

Abstract

This study presents WriteFlow, an AI voice-based writing assistant designed to support reflective academic writing through goal-oriented interaction. Academic writing involves iterative reflection and evolving goal regulation, yet prior research and a formative study with 17 participants show that writers often struggle to articulate and manage changing goals. While commonly used AI writing tools emphasize efficiency, they offer limited support for metacognition and writer agency. WriteFlow frames AI interaction as a dialogic space for ongoing goal articulation, monitoring, and negotiation grounded in writers' intentions. Findings from a Wizard-of-Oz study with 12 expert users show that WriteFlow scaffolds metacognitive regulation and reflection-in-action by supporting iterative goal refinement, maintaining goal-text alignment during drafting, and prompting evaluation of goal fulfillment. We discuss design implications for AI writing systems that prioritize reflective dialogue, flexible goal structures, and multi-perspective feedback to support intentional and agentic writing.