ABSTRACT

The act of writing potentially elicits strong emotions from high school students in both their school and personal writing. In this chapter, we focus on the role of affect in students’ writing in school. Although the process of writing has been studied from many different angles, the literature has all but ignored how students feel about their own writing as they are in the act of composing. Using findings from a variety of studies employing protocol analysis, that is, transcripts of real-time audio recordings of students as they compose both expository and personal writing in English class, in this chapter we report on the thoughts and feelings of high school students as they wrote for school. Our chapter is limited in that our use of case study methodology narrows our scope to the experiences of the students who have volunteered for our studies; our focus on this research follows from the fact that few, if any, other researchers have looked at real-time writing and its affective dimension.