relationship between writing anxiety and learning styles among graduate students, The

Journal of College Student Development, Nov/Dec 1998 by Onwuegbuzie, Anthony J

This study was conducted to determine the relationship between learning style and writing anxiety. Seventy-two female and 18 male graduate students aged 22 to 55 (86.5% Caucasian American, 13.5% African American) were administered the Writing Apprehension Test and the Productivity Environmental Preference Survey. Findings revealed that students with the highest levels of writing anxiety tended to be those who prefer to learn in warm environments, lacked self-motivation, liked structure, were peer-oriented learners, were authority-oriented learners, and did not prefer to undertake difficult tasks in the afternoon.

Writing anxiety is "a situation- and subject-specific individual difference concerned with people's general tendencies to approach or avoid writing" (Daly,1978, p.11). Although writing anxiety is the most common name for this phenomena in the literature, it also has been labelled as composition anxiety (Onwuegbuzie, 1997a), writing apprehension (e.g., Daly & Wilson, 1983), and writing block (e.g., Rose, 1984). According to Bloom (1980), approximately 10% to 25% of individuals experience some form of writing anxiety.

Researchers (Daly & Miller, 1975a, 1975b, 1975c; Daly & Shamo,1976,1978) have identified several characteristics of people suffering from writing anxiety, including: (a) they are apprehensive about demands for writing competency; (b) they fear their writing being evaluated, because they think that they will be rated negatively, and thus fail the task, assignment, or examination; (c) they avoid writing whenever possible; and (d) when they are forced to write, they tend to focus less energy and attention on the task itself, and thus allow concern to interfere with pertinent thought processes. Such detrimental behaviors can culminate in anxious students not turning in papers, turning papers in late, failing to attend class when writing assignments are due or essay examinations are scheduled, not enrolling in courses or with instructors who require writing, and delaying enrolling in such classes for as long as possible (Daly & Miller,1975a; Rose,1984). They consider writing as unrewarding or punishing (Daly & Shamo, 1978) or approach writing with negative attitudes (Fox, 1980). With writing anxiety, individuals have difficulty initiating writing (Daly, 1978), which leads to avoidance behaviors (Onwuegbuzie,1997a).

Research has shown that writing anxiety is a condition which can impede students in their academic work (Onwuegbuzie,1997a), discourage them from electing additional or advanced writing courses (Daly & Miller, 1975a, 1975b; Daly & Shamo, 1976, 1978; Richmond & DicksonMarkman, 1985), and encourage them to select academic majors that they perceive as requiring minimal writing (Daly & Shamo,1978).

Researchers have found that, compared to their low-anxious counterparts, the writing of students with high levels of writing anxiety tends be less profound (Daly,1977; Daly & Miller,1975b), lower in quality (Daly,1977; Petrosko, Kaiser, & Dietrich, 1984), less competent with respect to syntactic structure (Daly, 1978), and less clear due to the writer's inability to control and to manipulate language patterns with confidence (Book, 1976). In addition, anxious writers tend to use fewer adverbs and adjectives and are less proficient in their use of punctuation (Daly, 1977). According to Book, although high-anxious writers tend to write longer sentences, their compositions tend to contain fewer paragraphs, and consequently, the average length of their compositions tend to be much shorter than are those of their low-anxious counterparts. Aldrich (1982) asserted that composition-anxious students tend to write underdeveloped themes with longer sentences to mask their lack of in-depth understanding of the subject.

In addition, students with high levels of writing anxiety tend to receive lower course grades (Powell, 1984), to obtain lower levels of academic achievement on objective tests of grammar and writing mechanics (Daly, 1978; Daly & Miller, 1975b; Richmond & Dickson-Markman,1985), to attain lower grades in undergraduate composition classes (Powell), and to have more negative attitudes towards previous writing successes (Daly & Miller, 1975b) than do low-anxious students. Daly (1979) noted that evidence of writing anxiety in the classroom also can affect teachers' assessments of writing performance inasmuch as teachers, in general, expect writing-anxious students to write poorly and often evaluate their assignments accordingly. Furthermore, Daly and Wilson (1983) reported that students with high levels of writing anxiety tend to have poorer self-concepts than do their low-anxious counterparts. This finding is worsened by Daly's (1977) observation that negative attitudes about writing typically are selffulfilling, regardless of how competent the writer is in reality.

Aldrich (1982) and Faigley, Witte, and Daly (1981) concluded that, not only do high-anxious writers tend to avoid writing situations, but also they avoid instruction in writing, thereby impeding their ability to improve their skills. Moreover, Kelly (1975) describes the dilemma of writing-anxious students, who continually hear "The Voice of Authority," in which they perceive that someone (real or imagined) in a position of power over them constantly criticizes them while they are engaged in the writing process-heightening levels of anxiety. In addition, according to Kelly, such students also feel intimidated by "The Superior Intellect" during the writing process. That is, they feel that they are not as competent in writing as their peers.