Academic writing remains a key challenge for first-year tertiary students, with institutions globally adopting varied, often long-term, interventions. While effective, these approaches can be resource intensive. A 2023 study in a South African Private Higher Education Institution (PHEI) found that short, once-off visual and interactive interventions significantly supported academic writing development, particularly among creatively inclined students. The current follow-up study explored qualitative data from semi structured focus groups with students and lecturers involved in the original study. It explored which aspects of the interventions were memorable, internalised, and applied throughout students’ academic journeys. The findings offer insight into how creative-mind students and their lecturers perceive and manage the rigor and learning demands of academic writing. Data shows a congruence of factors observed by lecturers simultaneously displayed by students. Individual emotional experiences, self-belief and confidence levels determined student attitudes towards learning and managing needed applications, even in the presence of excellent support systems being accessible. Both the student participants and lecturers confirmed that students struggle with academic writing. Students find academic writing challenging, boring and stressful. However, they resort to coping mechanisms to get it done, as they know they need it in order to be successful in their academic journey. They are committed to succeeding and not letting their parents and lecturers down. They get embarrassed if they don’t get it right. Students shared that they adopt coping mechanisms such as synchronisation of thoughts to words on paper, listening to music as a vehicle of enabling and to calm the anxiety, breaking down large text into bite sizes to cope, drawing mind maps and visualising complex academic writing tasks. Lecturers find that using various visual and kinesthetic strategies to get students actively engaged, work well for learning something as linear as academic writing. Contextual practical examples are used in lessons to explain technical concepts that students struggle to grasp. In addition, findings show that students absorb writing skills better through explaining the functionality of academic writing in smaller quantities with repetitive active practice. In conclusion, learning sessions designed as bite-sized, visual and interactive, cognisant of learning preferences and anxiety barriers, have a greater chance of success in creative-mind students learning, understanding and applying academic writing quicker. An Interpretivist approach collecting qualitative data by way of online semi structured focus groups was used. Invited participants were students and lecturers from a Private Higher Education Institution’s national campuses that participated in the original subjects in Phase 1 of the study. Narratives and discussions were transcribed using Microsoft Teams recordings and then tabulated for line-by-line coding by the authors of the study. Key experiences were noted down and correlated into theme pools for interpretation of findings.

Keywords: Tertiary Education, Private Higher Education Institution, PHEI, Academic writing, Interventions, creative student, experiences, learning process.