Mitigating writing anxiety through creative practices and community building

Abstract

Writing anxiety has been documented to have an inverse relationship with students’ self-efficacy (Huerta et al., 2016). At the University of Southampton, the authors have devised a set of highly creative and practical steps to help students break the negative cycle of anxiety, negative feedback, and unrealised writing potential.

Apprehension around academic writing is a well-established and complex phenomenon that has been shown to negatively impact students in a variety of ways throughout their learning (Daly and Miller, 1985; Calimag, 2021; Mitchell et al., 2023). Furthermore, negative experiences of the writing process and feedback on writing often compound and exacerbate these anxieties in students’ cognitive, social, and behavioural abilities (Bastug et al., 2017; Mercer and Gulseren, 2024). To ameliorate what often becomes a negative cycle of anxiety and stress around academic writing, educators can offer creative and meaningful practices that are easily adaptable to a variety of educational contexts and content (Bandura, 1977; Mitchell et al., 2021).

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Identifiers

ORCID for Alice Stinetorf: orcid.org/0009-0001-5931-8094

ORCID for Felicity Flynn: orcid.org/0009-0004-6093-382X

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