The writing processes underpinning wellbeing: Insight and emotional clarity in poetic autoethnography and freewriting

Abstract

Investigations of the expressive writing paradigm have shown that writing about one's experiences have positive effects on wellbeing. Understanding the writing processes facilitating self-discovery which underpin these positive outcomes is currently lacking. Prior research has suggested two writing processes that can lead to discovery: (1)Knowledge Constitutinginvolving the fast synthesis of verbal and non-verbal memory traces into text; and (2)Knowledge Transforminginvolving controlled engagement with written text for revision. Here, two genres—autoethnographic poetry and freewriting–were studied as they manifest a different pattern design forKnowledge ConstitutingandKnowledge Transforming. One hundred and seventeen, L1 English speaking participants from 3 northwestern universities in the US completed a two-stage, genre specific writing process. Participants were randomly assigned to a writing condition. Poetry writers first did aKnowledge Constitutingwriting task followed by aKnowledge Transformingtask. Freewriters repeated aKnowledge Constitutingtask. Participants completed insight and emotional clarity scales after stage one and stage two. Data was analyzed using a two-way repeated measures ANOVA with one between (writing condition) and one within subject (time of prompt) variables. Descriptive results show that it is theKnowledge Constitutingprocess which elicits high levels of insight and emotional clarity for both genres at the first time point.Knowledge Transformingat time-point 2 significantly reduced insight. WhileKnowledge Constitutingat time-point 2 significantly increased emotional clarity. The results provide initial support for the position that it is theKnowledge Constitutingwriting process which facilitates self-discovery and underpins writing-for-wellbeing outcomes.