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).

Some of these innovative practices were demonstrated during this session at ALDcon25. In this interactive workshop, Learning Developers (LDers) had the opportunity to try out a variety of creative practices designed to reduce apprehension and anxiety around academic writing whilst simultaneously building students’ self-efficacy and developing positive learning communities. The workshop aligned with the ‘LDers and Inclusive LD’ sub-theme, showcasing activities that can be adapted to meet the needs of a diverse range of learners.

The activities explored in this workshop were also designed to promote positive learning environments (Advance HE, 2025) that foster a sense of community and belonging (Jury et al., 2017; Abegglen et al., 2021). Participants were required to engage fully with the activities and with each other in order to maximise the value from the session and to take away a bank of useful, replicable ideas.

In the wider context and with reference to ongoing work with specific awarding gap populations, the authors’ writing practices within the Widening Participation and Social Mobility Directorate at the University of Southampton look to explore and build upon the existing body of research that links the above outcomes with increased student achievement (Hadden et al., 2020; Wong et al., 2021; Andrews et al., 2023).