DIFFERENCES IN WRITERS ' INITIAL TASK REPRESENTATIONS

Research and Improvement, Department of Education (OERI/ED)for the Center for the Study of Writing. However, the opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the OERI/ED and no official endorsement by the OERI/ED should be inferred. I...!.s. This exploratory study investigates how writers represent their task to themselves before beginning to write. Using data from verbal protocols, we examine the initial plans of twelve writers (five experts and seven student writers) who were working on an expository writing task. The protocols were coded for types of planning. We also obtained independent measures of the quality of the subjects ' plans and of the quality of their texts. The analysis suggests that both the quantity and quality of a writer's initial planning may make a difference in the quality of the final text. We found a positive correlation between the amount of initial planning and text quality, and between th