How Expressive Writing Can Empower Students

Key points Expressive writing can help students process emotions and foster personal growth. Expressive writing can also help to increase students’ comfort in exploring and expressing emotion. Incorporating expressive writing in the curriculum positions emotional health as integral to learning. Late at night, a student sits at her desk while the soft glow of a laptop screen casts shadows across the room. Outside, the city street is quiet, but inside, her mind is racing. Fingers hover over the keyboard and then begin typing—slowly at first, then with a growing urgency. The assignment is an expressive writing exercise for her university course on the relationship between storytelling and healing. After reading others’ stories about trauma, obsessive-compulsive disorder, cancer, epilepsy, and more, the student sits alone with her own stories. In the stillness of her room, the student writes freely, pouring thoughts onto the screen. She writes anonymously, and that freedom unlocks something—emotions begin to surface, words flow, and the page becomes a safe space. In this medical humanities course on storytelling and healing, students do not just study illness and trauma from a distance—they dive into their own emotional landscapes, using writing as both a mirror and a balm. Fashioning my assignments after James W. Pennebaker and John Frank Evans’s work in Expressive Writing: Words That Heal , I asked students to write four expressive writing exercises over the course of the semester as well as a final metacognitive reflection. As their final reflections suggest, what emerged was an appreciation for narrative as a tool for catharsis, emotional clarity, and long-term self-care, as students discovered that writing can help in ways they had not anticipated. What Expressive Writing Looked Like in Our Course Source: Marcos Paulo Prado/ Unsplash In Chapter 11 of Expressive Writing: Words that Heal , Evans presents a six-week program that starts in week 1 with four 20-minute timed free writing sessions. In weeks 2 through 6, the focus shifts to more-structured activities and reflective exercises. Weeks 2 through 6 involve writing poetry, affirmations , transactional letters, and legacies, all based on the material generated in the […]

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