Resources || University Writing

Tagged Entries: Writing Anxiety

Academic writing is a unique type of writing and can vary across disciplines. Use these materials to better understand the elements of academic writing, such as voice, disciplinary writing, and college-level writing. Reading academic sources is an important part of learning how to write in your discipline. For tips on how to engage with reading these sources, see our section on Reading Difficult Materials 

Materials designed by Colby Axelberd, Christopher Basgier, Katharine Brown, Amy Cicchino, Clare Hancock, Megan Haskins, James Truman, and Livi Welch

This worksheet is designed to help incoming first-year college students learn a bit about writing at the college level. There are also scenarios where students can consider what they would do in difficult writing situations 


The handout breaks down some implicit expectations related to academic voice, such as when and how to use first-person writing, jargon, style, and sentence variation 


This worksheet invites you to revise a piece of writing by paying attention to its voice within a sample paragraph 


This brief handout provides some examples of academic voice from various disciplines 


This worksheet provides excerpts from disciplinary writing and asks participants to guess the disciplinary context for the writing. By doing this, we hope you will begin to see how different disciplines structure and style their writing 


This worksheet invites writers to consider the rhetorical situation of a genre and plan their writing within that genre

 

 This worksheet helps you apply reading like a writer to your work by inviting you to examine written artifacts from a writerly perspective by paying attention to features like structure, key terms, signposting, and verb use


This worksheet is meant to help graduate students approach writing their first manuscript by making explicit options for manuscript section organization and looking at examples 


This handout invites readers to compare an excerpt from a dissertation to an excerpt of the same material, rewritten for nonspecialist or "general" audiences


This handout invites extension professionals to reflect on the kinds of academic and non-academic genres the produce in their positions.


This worksheet invites writers to plan a piece of writing for a general audience by leading them through the elements of the rhetorical situation


This worksheet guides you through developing an argument and countering opposing arguments with a focus on claims, reasoning, and impact

This resource provides helpful information for students writing in a foreign language. Though writing in another language comes with its obstacles, it also yields many benefits that can lead to deeper learning and an elevated relationship with language

The writing process can be stressful, and it is easy to feel anxious about writing, struggle to start writing, or lose focus while writing. Use these resources to implement mindfulness strategies such as meditative pauses, progress tracking, and reflective journaling into your writing routine.   

Materials designed by G. Travis Adams, Christopher Basgier, Katharine Brown, Michael Cook, and Annie Small 

This brief handout describes writer’s block and explains its causes 

This brief worksheet explains solutions to writer’s block and a short reflective writing prompts to help you begin overcoming your own writer’s block 

This is a handout useful for instructors as they help students navigate writer's block

This longer worksheet explains some of the causes of writer’s block and writing anxiety, and it offers reflective prompts you can use to manage writing challenges 

This handout describes the meditative pause, or brief moments in which you deliberately stop writing and check in with your body, your breath, and your mind, before returning to write 

The following meditation script, “Focus into Breathing,” can be used before you write as a way of slowing down a busy mind and focusing attention 

This activity helps you recognize your patterns of thought about writing and replace self-defeating thoughts with empowering ones to reduce the occurrence of writer’s block and writing anxiety 

This activity combines Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and contemplative and embodied pedagogies to help writers externalize and silence an overly harsh inner critic

This brief writing prompt helps writers plan how to use their time productively in a writing session

This worksheet guides you in using expressive writing for self-discovery. You will learn about different types of expressive writing, such as answering prompts or making gratitude lists, and can complete several reflective prompts.

This worksheet provides two brief writing prompts to use as a warm-up as well as to recognize and celebrate moments of growth in writing skills

This writing warm-up encourages writers to affirm their readiness for writing through identifying the strengths they bring to the project

This writing warm-up invites writers to reflect on a semester's worth of writing and recognize moments of growth

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