Browsing by Subject "writing"
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Item Extending the Writing Paradigm: Is Writing Haiku Poetry Healing?(2009-10-28) Stephenson, KittredgeHaiku poetry was investigated in the context of the narrative writing paradigm to evaluate its healing potential. Participants, 98 introductory psychology students at a large southwestern university, wrote for 20 minutes a day on three consecutive days and completed self-report measures of happiness, satisfaction with life, spiritual meaning, creativity, physiological symptomatology, depression, anxiety, and health/illness orientation at baseline and 3-week follow-up. A series of ANCOVA linear contrasts were used to examine differences between groups writing narrative about a neutral topic, haiku about a neutral topic, haiku about nature, or haiku about a negative life event. It was found that writing haiku demonstrated increased levels of creativity overall. In addition, the nature haiku group reported significantly lower levels of physiological symptomatology than the negative life event haiku group and had significantly lower illness orientation than the haiku control group. These results provide a partial replication of a previous study. They also suggest that writing haiku poetry is a creative activity that leads one to be more sensitive to the writing topic, whatever it may be. Narrative writing, by contrast, appears to help integrate one?s experience. The difference between the heightened sensitivity of writing haiku and the integrative capacity of narrative are compared and recommendations made for future research.Item Impact of written emotional disclosure of trauma on laboratory induced pain(Texas A&M University, 2008-10-10) Creech, Suzannah KThis study was undertaken to determine whether written emotional disclosure of trauma impacted capsaicin induced pain immediately after writing and at a one-month follow-up, and the extent to which a lifetime history of trauma alters pain under neutral conditions. Three experiments were conducted to answer these questions. In Experiment 1 participants were randomly assigned to write about either a neutral or a trauma topic, and they concurrently completed the capsaicin test. In Experiment 2, the capsaicin test was administered to trauma history and no trauma history participants and pain ratings and secondary hyperalgesia were recorded under neutral conditions. In Experiment 3, participants wrote for three days and completed the radiant heat test before writing on day 1 and after writing on day 3. They also completed the capsaicin test on either day 4 or at a one-month follow-up (day 30). Taken together, these studies had several important results. First, radiant heat withdrawal latencies, ratings of pain intensity and unpleasantness, and area of secondary hyperalgesia were all significantly increased when participants had a history of traumatic experiences. This is evidence that trauma history is sufficient to alter pain regulatory mechanisms, and this may be attributable to the chronic negative affective state induced by trauma history and sensitization of shared circuits involved in both pain and emotion. Furthermore, our findings suggest that written emotional disclosure may lead to long-term changes in pain modulatory pathways that regulate central sensitization, without altering systems that regulate spontaneous pain.Item Perceptions on what Influences Writing in Agricultural Journalism(2011-02-22) Wilburn, Misty B.Over the years, multiple studies have been conducted to determine what influences writing. Through the studies, few concrete conclusions have been reached on why individuals write the way they do. Research on children has shown that reading does influence writing; however, there has been little research done on adults. Some research has been conducted on how emotions influence writing, but no solid consensus has been reached. This study asked a select group of agricultural journalism and communications student writers what they perceived influenced their writing. The results of this study have implications for the way agricultural journalism and communications students learn and are taught. The study may serve as a model for further research. The purposive sample was agricultural journalism and communications students who were selected by the lead instructor at their school. The instructors served as gatekeepers. Each U.S. university with an agricultural journalism and communications program was asked to participate. The study showed that respondents believe many things influence their writing, and the factor mentioned most was surroundings. Respondents also mentioned the things they read and the things they had written in the past as influencers of their writing. The following recommendations were made based on the findings and conclusions of this study. Researchers should continue to look at what writers believe influences their writing as a way to develop better writers. Instructors should focus on teaching students in various surroundings. Students should not be allowed to write only in the surrounding in which they feel the most comfortable. Research should be conducted to determine if what respondents perceive influences their writing truly does.Item Teacher Perceptions and Classroom Observations of Writing Opportunities in Prekindergarten Classrooms(2014-05-07) Hogan, Kathy MarieThis multiple-article dissertation examined secondary data collected by an educational service center in a large area of southeast Texas to analyze the similarities and differences in writing practices of prekindergarten teachers. The aim of this study was to determine the direction of future professional development sessions and coaching to support the implementation of writing in prekindergarten. The first study investigated teacher perceptions of writing practices and writing usage by type and frequency as collected through descriptive statistics and analysis from a self-report study. The second study examined the educational use of writing and writing artifacts through observational research of three interacting components in prekindergarten classrooms: the teacher, five students, and the overall classroom. Four different educational environments were investigated: rural, suburban, urban, and private schools. Authentic classroom behaviors and differences between monolingual and English Language Learners (ELLs) were investigated in relation to their use of writing. The findings from both studies revealed great variability from frequent to infrequent classroom use of writing. The results from the first study revealed that a few classrooms used writing to a great extent, especially in dramatic play areas, such as a doctor?s office or restaurant to enhance play. In other classrooms, teachers reported that children write their names on a regular basis or draw pictures in journals, but otherwise do not use writing. In many classrooms, the Morning Message or lists were developed as a teacher-child collaborative effort during shared writing, but often these activities did not take place. The second study revealed how writing usage in the classroom also varied, from procedural skills, such as tracing and copying letters or words, to conceptual use, creating stories using drawings and invented spelling, to the implementation of a fully developed Writer?s Workshop in prekindergarten. Results suggest that prekindergarten teachers are generally unsure how to use writing in the classroom, how often to use it, and how appropriate its use is with young children. The implications of these studies provide useful information on current practices and suggest that professional development and coaching may enhance teaching practices by demonstrating ways to increase access to writing opportunities.Item The impact of written emotional disclosure on laboratory induced pain(Texas A&M University, 2005-11-01) Creech, Suzannah K.Previous research has demonstrated the impact of negative emotional states on pain modulation. The direction of this modulation has been shown to correspond to the arousal level and the valence of the emotional state, whether naturally occurring or induced in the laboratory. Other research has consistently linked written emotion disclosure of trauma to better long-term health outcomes among several populations. As most of these studies have focused on long-term health outcome effects of disclosure, little research has been done on the immediate effects of the paradigm on affective or physiological states. This study investigated the short-term effects of written disclosure of trauma on laboratory-induced pain, affective state, and other physiological measures of stress and arousal. Other goals of the study included investigating preexisting differences in pain sensitivity between participants corresponding to lifetime experience of trauma, and determining the degree to which baseline pain testing alters pain sensitivity after emotion induction by creating a conditioned, contextual fear. This is the first study to apply the written emotional disclosure paradigm to laboratory-induced pain.Item The Rhetoric Of Writing: A Rhetorical Analysis of Modern Writing Memoirs(2010-01-14) Illich, Lindsay P.This dissertation analyzes concepts of the writing self in works about writing by professional creative writers (writers, poets, and essayists). Through a rhetorical analysis of these texts, I observe that writers view the writing self as a complex structure that is fully conscious as a rhetorical agent, an embodied self that interacts with the world and actively chooses linguistic representations of that experience, and maintains a concept of self that is subject to influences which the writers do not fully understand (such as inspiration and insight). The discourse used by writers to describe their writing processes challenges recent critiques of expressionism and the model of social construction that pervades contemporary composition scholarship. Chapter II examines Virginia Woolf's use of the central metaphor for invention in A Room of One's Own, a river, which sharply calls into question a unified view of the self which is central to critiques of expressivism by composition scholars. Woolf's concept of invention requires a negation of the self and harmony with nature (widely conceived as the entire world, including texts). Chapter III, an analysis of two writing memoirs by contemporary professional creative writers, Annie Dillard's The Writing Life and Donald Hall's Life Work, finds that Dillard and Hall use metaphors that establish freedom (rhetorical agency) and bodily presence as primary characteristics of their writing processes. Chapter IV, an analysis of two collections of essays about writing by professional creative writers, argues that the writers' use of metaphors of inspiration and instrumental metaphors creates a concept of the writing self that maintains a sense of writerly control (rhetorical agency) alternating with a sense of a diminished control; ultimately, the two concepts coexist in the minds of the writers. Chapter V proposes that the rhetorical situation of the contemporary composition classroom affects students' creativity adversely. The chapter also suggests further analyses of writing memoirs can provide new ways of understanding writing processes (as opposed to one writing process model) and therefore contribute substantially to composition scholarship and pedagogy.