From Intention to Text: AI-Supported Goal Setting in Academic Writing
For academic writers, this work addresses the lack of metacognitive support in AI writing tools by enabling goal-oriented reflection, though the study is small-scale and Wizard-of-Oz.
WriteFlow, an AI voice-based writing assistant, helps academic writers articulate and manage evolving goals through dialogic interaction, improving metacognitive regulation and goal-text alignment in a Wizard-of-Oz study with 12 expert users.
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.