PSYCHOLOGY & WRITING | 5 Tips from the Science of Writing

I’ve been writing professionally for nearly four decades. I watch for research that confirms the benefits. There’s evidence that expressing yourself in writing can improve your outlook, enhance momentum, increase self-awareness, strengthen memory, and just plain bring you joy. It can even reduce symptoms of illness and expand your social reach.

Here are five tips for using writing for positive benefit:

1. Exploit the effort of revision for personal awareness. 
   

One study had college freshmen at Duke University write narratives about how they viewed their ability to keep up with college work. Those who expressed insecurity were divided into control and experimental groups. The latter was exposed to taped interviews with successful students who’d struggled as freshmen, then asked to revise their original essays. This provided an opportunity for them to rethink their self-concept in a more hopeful way. Compared to the control group (which had no such inspiring exposure), these students substantially improved their subsequent performance, both short- and long-term. Writing gave them a way to articulate and solidify their sense of purpose.

2. Journal regularly on personal matters. 
   

James Pennebaker, a cognitive psychology professor at the University of Texas, asked students to write for 15-20 minutes a day. They could choose an important personal issue or a superficial topic. The students who wrote about personal issues, Pennebaker discovered, had fewer illnesses and visits to the student health center. He’s seen significant benefits from personal writing for those suffering from stress, anxiety, and trauma.

3. Use writing to set up your future.
   

Organizational psychologist Adam Grant ran a study with two groups of engineers who’d been fired and were looking for their next job. Those who consistently engaged with expressive writing had processed their negative feelings and were less depressed and hostile than those who didn’t write. “Eight months later,” Grant says, “less than 19% of the engineers in the control groups were reemployed full-time, compared with more than 52% of the engineers in the expressive writing group.” Writing helps people to bounce back more quickly from setbacks and hardships.

4. Practice reframing for mental agility. 

While writing and revising, you might search for different ways to say something. This calls on the brain’s association cortex, a system of feedback loops that gathers and mixes diverse information to generate new thoughts. If you practice perceptual flexibility and openness while writing, you can tap into these feedback loops for new insights and aha! moments. (There’s plenty of research supporting this result.)

5. Write occasionally in longhand. 

Research shows that cursive writing actively engages your mind and improves your memory of what you write in ways that typing or dictating cannot achieve. “One key difference is movement,” says Dr. Marc Seifert, author of The Definitive Book of Handwriting Analysis. “That involves the motor cortex of the brain, so...you’re using more of the brain than when you simply type.” 

While writing, keep goals in mind for using it to improve your life.

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Dr. Katherine Ramsland teaches forensic psychology and behavioral criminology in the graduate program at DeSales University. She has appeared as an expert on more than 250 crime documentaries and was an executive producer on Murder House Flip and A&E’s Confession of a Serial killer: BTK. The author of more than 1,800 articles and 73 books, including Confession of a Serial Killer, The Serial Killer’s Apprentice and How to Catch a Killer, she pens a regular blog for Psychology Today. She has also written a fiction series based on a female forensic psychologist who consults on death investigations. Dead-Handed is her most recent book.