In my research essay, I plan to prove that expressive writing effectively reduces stress and anxiety symptoms in adults. Beginning college is a new chapter in life that is expected to be exciting, however can come with copious amounts of stress. I am expecting to find evidence of positive and meaningful results in students using expressive writing, such as personal daily journaling, as a way to reduce their stress and anxiety symptoms.
Background: Expressive writing is a therapeutic outlet for people to use in order to express themselves, reflect, and write about stressful and emotional experiences.
How I Intend to Use It: I intend to use this article as a source of data as it speaks on the Perceived Stress Scale and the Mental Well-Being Scale.
Background: Individuals (college students) who practiced mindfulness and expressive writing experienced higher amounts of physical and mental benefits compared to those who did not.
How I Intend to Use It: I intend to use this article for examples of mindfulness and expressive writing used by college students in order to reduce their levels of stress and anxiety.
Background: This article explores a professional skills course that has the participants keep a diary/journal over the course of fourteen weeks in order to teach and practice mindfulness.
How I Intend to Use It: I intend to use this article by using the practices in this article to persuade my audience that these techniques are very important for the mental health of students and should be taught in a course as stress is very plausible for doing unwell in school.
Background: This article dives into the many different benefits that come from expressive writing, such as stress, release, anxiety, and health.
How I Intend to Use It: I plan on using the information in this article to help express the benefits of expressive writing such as how it can help your social interactions and emotional well-being.
Background: Expressive writing can help reduce test-taking anxiety in students.
How I Intend to Use It: I plan ts article to express the importance of mental health and well-being as a student and how it affects your academic success.
Counterintuitive Fall 2024 
I like your commitment to this project, PRblog, and hope that investigating it will be as beneficial to you personally as it will be to any reader of the results.
I must also say that if I were asked to join a debate team on this topic, I’d be much more comfortable on the Negative side than the Positive. It’s not that I don’t believe in the benefits of self-awareness, careful concentration, self-analysis through writing or any other positive mediation that helps us reduce our stress. What’s difficult about the job you’ve set yourself is that it’s so hard to PROVE the benefits.
I spent half an hour with your second source (or maybe it just FELT like half an hour) and realized after the first 24 pages that there are more variables to the categories of mindfulness and meditation and expressive writing and the combinations of all of them plus the variables in the study subjects and the evidence gathered to calibrate the results that a skilled debater would have no trouble casting doubt on any conclusions the studies drew.
That, I think, will be the challenge for you in this project. To take just one example: your second source drew its 120 subjects from a pool of college students, all at the same college, all of them psychology students. They self-selected as participants, meaning they were invested in the outcome, which means they wanted to show results, which means their responses to after-study questionnaires were not reliable. Or so the skillful debater would say.
Yesterday we examined some text for Claims. By Monday, you’ll have scoured your section of the PTSD article for claims, poking at them to reveal their motivations and nuances. You’ll need to bring that critical approach to your reading of sources on the Expressive Writing topic, PRblog.
This was meant to encourage you to proceed with care, not to discourage you from your topic. I sense that you’re the type of person who will not be easily discouraged. Press on, please, and bring home something that will stand up to scrutiny.