FROM INTENTIONS TO TEXT - ARTICULATING INITIAL INTENTIONS FOR WRITING

This exploratory study examines the extent to which asking 20 entry-le vel and 19 basic-level college writing students to articulate their in itial intentions for writing facilitated the identification of three k inds of instructional problems the students faced in moving from inten tions to text. In collaborative planning sessions, the students were e ncouraged to develop initial intentions for their writing that explici tly linked information they planned to use in letters of application t o the rhetorical issues of purpose, audience, and discourse convention s. Analyses of the students' letters revealed that students who began with what were seen as useful initial intentions also tended to write more effective texts than the other students and that the usefulness o f students' initial intentions was a better predictor of the success o f their texts than the entry-level or basic-level distinction. Also, w hen students were asked to judge the effectiveness of their own and ot her students' letters in post hoc interviews, they tended to rate thei r own letters more highly than those written by other students. The in terpretation of these trends depends on a consideration of the experie nces of both students who fit the overall trends and those those broke those trends.