An Investigation of Avoidance Behaviour in Writing

Abstract

Writing skills are needed across all courses, across all discipline research papers, projects, reports, assignments. However, many claimed they have “writers’ block” which hinders them from writing as often as they hoped, or as much as they wished. Although many may think writing block stems from a writer who only lacks content. However, more often than not, writing block is caused of writers’ fear of writing. The writer becomes so overwhelmed by the fear of writing that he/she is paralyzed with fear. Fear in writing is a learned behaviour that will influence the writer’s behaviour towards writing-related environment. Past studies have shown that one way for people to not live in fear is to avoid the action totally. This study is done to investigate the facets of avoidance behaviour to avoid writing-related activities. 108 participants responded to a survey. The instrument used is a survey with 6 sections. The first section is demographic profile. The second section is on cognitive avoidance and it has 4 items. The third section is somatic avoidance with 7 items. The fourth section is protective avoidance and has (i) problems with punctuation (9 items), (ii) problems with language use (7 items), and (iii) problems with writing skills (9 items). The fifth section is situation with 5 items and the last section is substitution with 7 items Findings reveal that when writer fear writing, they may resort to avoidance behaviour such as cognitive, somatic, protective, situational and also substitution avoidance.