Expressive writing in English: past and present

This research focuses on the analysis and comparison, from a quantitative and a qualitative point of view, of three genres of expressive writing. The first one is represented by a literary work, an autobiography (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1945-1955), in which the writer recounts about her mother’s death, as well as how her brother and herself deal with the loss of such an important figure in their lives. The second genre is represented by a non-fiction book (The Freedom Writers Diary, 1999, ed. by Erin Gruwell) made up of journals written by troubled students from a High School in California experiencing cultural, ethnic and racial tensions. The third one is represented by a more contemporary corpus of 50 messages posted on well-known Social Networks, where different people, especially the so-called “millennials”, share daily experiences on how they face up to traumatic experiences that have altered their lives. The quantitative analysis was performed thanks to the “Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count” (LIWC) programme, whose function is to identify and subdivide the words used by individuals in their essays/writings in different categories, such as negative or positive emotion words, causal words, insight words. This quantitative analysis of a corpus made up of selected parts in each genre will lead to a qualitative discussion on the importance of writing as a significant experience in traumatic events that often leads to mental and physical health improvement. The results of the research show that both in the second genre (the extracts analysed are diary entries of students having a special teacher who cares a lot about their happiness), and in the third one (Facebook posts, mostly) people who write about their emotions and have a feedback have many possibilities to recover from their sufferings/mental problems, as the act of sharing is itself a positive experience, a “sense of community”, that in a way can be compared to a kind of psychological therapy. As a consequence, the number of positive-emotion words is higher in the end and the choice of a different vocabulary is evident.