Academic writing: anxiety, confusion and the affective domain

Amanda French

doi:10.18552/joaw.v8i2.487

Journal of Academic Writing Nov 2018 OA PDF

Academic writing: anxiety, confusion and the affective domain

Amanda French Birmingham City University

Abstract

After working in Further Education (FE) and Higher Education (HE) in the United Kingdom for over thirty years, and completing a doctoral thesis on the subject of lecturers’ perceptions of academic writing in HE (French 2014), it became very clear to me that many students and lecturers (although that is a subject of another paper) experience the processes of producing academic writing in very physical and emotional ways. In this paper, I will be discussing how my students often articulated the intensity and emotional nature of their academic writing experiences using words like ‘fear’, ‘frustration’, ‘outrage’, ‘exhaustion’ and ‘yearning’. This emotion and strength of feeling drew me to consider the relationship between the development of a positive writing identity and the affective domain. Subsequently, in my practice as a tutor in HE, I incorporated the affective domain into my work and seek here to stimulate debate with subject lecturers about how important emotions, even negative emotions like confusion and anxiety, can be to the development of a positive academic writing identity for students. The paper argues that, by using the affective domain as a pedagogic springboard, subject lecturers can formulate more collaborative, supportive and emotionally sensitive communities of writing practice.

Journal: Journal of Academic Writing
Published: 2018-11-01
DOI: 10.18552/joaw.v8i2.487
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Topics: argument collaborative writing
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Cited by in this index (1)

Rantala-Lehtola et al. (2022)

Bachelor’s thesis writing as an emotional process

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Academic writing: anxiety, confusion and the affective domain

Abstract

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