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Solve your researchers’ writing problems, pre-empt their mental health problems.

I benefited enormously from this experience. I feel like I’m slowly starting to regain my confidence in my own ability to work, and this camp and my writing partner meetings have had a lot to do with that. Thanks for putting together such a thoughtful program. I’m not terrified of my writing goals this term, for once!

Do you worry about how to help your students and researchers live and work well throughout their current roles and beyond? Could they benefit from tailored support to build robust working habits and submit high-quality papers and chapters on time?

Via the LiveWrite programme, offer your students and researchers a personalized peer partnership matching service complemented by a rich programme of events and resources to help them:

  • meet their academic milestones
  • eliminate the habits and mindsets that lead to poor outcomes for their health, happiness, and performance
  • create meaningful professional relationships
  • and build powerful habits for taking their next professional steps with confidence.

Does it work?

Yes. LiveWrite grows out of three successful years designing and running the Baillie Gifford Writing Partnerships Programme for over 450 students and researchers in the Humanities Division at the University of Oxford. Over 86% of more than 250 participants who provided end-of-term feedback reported being quite, very, or extremely satisfied with their term’s writing achievements. Over 88% reported that having a writing partner was quite, very, or extremely helpful in terms of getting more writing done, feeling better about how much writing they get done, improving social connectedness, adding structure to the week, and improving their ability to focus. Hundreds provided moving testimonials on how this programme changed their (writing) lives.

See the full data summary at

I'm Emily Troscianko, a coach, writer, researcher, and writing support designer. After a DPhil followed by a prestigious 4-year Junior Research Fellowship in cognitive literary studies and health humanities at the University of Oxford, during which I built a strong research profile in mental health, I began developing and testing methods for helping meaningful habit change happen, and stick—in both 1-1 coaching and the larger-scale writing programme context.

You can find out more about me, from cognitive realism to powerlifting, a consciousness textbook to an academic failure podcast, at

Or see my eating disorder-focused coaching and research at

Why writing?

Four reasons.

  1. Writing well is the currency of academic progression.
  2. Writing is one key way in which humans think and communicate.
  3. Writing is difficult and junior academics often have little idea how to do it effectively.
  4. And so writing is often where mental health problems switch from potential to actual.

What’s the problem?

The most important things we do in our working lives aren’t usually the easiest or the most urgent.

The quicker we can learn to do the important things, every single week, despite all the reasons not to, the more successful we become.

Meeting academic milestones is partly about mastering academic techniques and conventions—how to develop an argument or concisely summarize existing research. But it’s also about how to make focused thought and creativity a part of your week.

Most students and junior academics waste an awful lot of time and energy trying to figure out how to do this from first principles. This generates a huge amount of needless suffering and simple inefficiency. Academic brilliance is no protection—especially when other work or caring commitments and/or mental health difficulties are in the picture, but even when they aren’t.

And Covid has raised the stakes. After two years of highly disrupted study, many researchers I speak to feel daunted and even despairing at the thought of trying to “make up for lost time”, many find their powers of concentration are seriously depleted, many feel socially isolated, and many have no practical idea of how to go about turning things around.

What’s the solution?

I just wanted to let you know that I have tremendously benefitted from your course. It has enabled me to find more focus again and get some writing done and enjoy it. Despite my awareness of and knowledge about the addictive effects of social media and other online distractions I did not have the strength or willpower to resist the temptations of constant procrastination. So I usually ended up doing all kinds of favours for all kinds of colleagues and taking those as an excuse for not doing the more important work, which needs planning (thanks so much for your templates!!) and time slots with goals and without distractions. I am really grateful for all your valuable inputs and the way in which you have designed and moderated this excellent course.

What if there were a single solution for all these academic and welfare problems? Maybe it seems ridiculous to think there could be. Obviously that solution isn’t going to be the same for everyone. But the meta-solution is universal: It’s training students to stop taking their everyday habits for granted and start experimenting with them until they find what works for them.

The thing I love most about behaviour-focused coaching is that it takes things people think they know how to do (how to sit, how to eat, how to plan your day) and shines a new light on them: a light that shows how poor our accreted ways of doing these things often are, and just how much we gain from getting them working better for us. And, crucially, how simple it is to get that process going.

The insight/action gap can take years or decades to bridge, and seeing how eminently solvable the problems are is part of how to bridge it quicker. The other part is starting to actually try out potential solutions. And this is where being in it together with someone else who has similar aims makes the difference between stasis and real change.

In both the writing programme I designed and ran for Oxford and the coaching methods I’ve employed with success in both eating disorder recovery and academic/professional performance, it’s been consistently beautiful to observe just how significant and swift the improvements can be when people know what to do and have support in actually doing it.

A targeted behaviour-focused approach anchored by a peer partnership helps students prioritize the truly high-importance activities in their week. And that can transform almost everything else, including their physical and mental health, from the bottom up.

A peer partnership is an anchor for experimenting with and incrementally improving personal habits for writing, working, and living well.

Postgraduate degrees and postdoctoral research roles demands a great deal of those undertaking them—as well as of the academic staff supervising and managing them. The curated partnerships method is an effective way to ensure that a robust comfort zone for academic research is built in a way that lets participants think and write daringly and frees up their advisors' time and energy for giving them the intellectual guidance to do so.

The LiveWrite programme, as a framework for optimizing academic welfare, helps maximize the benefits participants derive from contact with your welfare team, study skills trainers, and all your other institutional support structures—by getting a peer-supported habit of experimentation and progressive optimization firmly embedded as a bedrock on which they can confidently ground everything else.

How do we do it?

  • We train you to set up successful 1-1 peer partnerships for your researchers. We provide welcome material templates for you to adapt to your cohorts’ needs and priorities. You get access to a growing bank of academic planning and creativity resources to share with participants.
  • We train you in how to run variants on intensive events and consultations to accelerate your researchers’ learning.
  • We offer tailored pre/post-participation assessment templates and in-depth troubleshooting advice.
  • You choose from premium add-ons including playbooks for themed events and retreats and competitions; advanced tuition in the psychology of study-relevant habit change; and direct provision of partner matchings and event facilitation.

We Are LiveWrite.

LiveWrite is born of extensive experience in cultivating mental and physical health and professional performance in an elite university setting and beyond.

We have rich data and testimonials showing that our partnerships, events, and resources work, and how they do. We train you to get researchers building work/life habits to underpin their happiness and their success.

Participating in online group writing events run by Emily – writing sprints, lunches, wakeups, and drinks – has been the highlight of my working life this year. I signed up for the programme because I was looking to infuse my writing life with a sense of structure and community, which is often difficult to achieve for academics in the Humanities who are used to working alone and without much guidance – let alone during a global pandemic. I wanted to see if I could make academic writing more enjoyable and learn more about the process of writing, which is so central to my work as a post-doctoral research fellow in the Humanities but was somehow rarely – if ever! – treated as a skill that deserves a lot of reflection during my graduate training at Oxford. What I mean by this is not learning what makes a piece of academic writing good, which is often talked about, but what a healthy, satisfying, even joyous writing routine might look like.
The programme of events designed by Emily really fulfilled that need for me. Through a combination of group events and sessions with a writing partner, I created a schedule of three or four weekly meetups and was able to do almost all of my writing in those scheduled slots. It meant that writing turned into a more tangible and more sociable activity which was put on the calendar just like any other key task – teaching, work meetings, and so on. Even more importantly, it meant that I didn’t feel guilty about not writing at any other time, which I realised had been quite a mental drain when writing had been left to just happen around all my other commitments. I didn’t have to constantly work up the motivation to sit down to the difficult task of writing, which is a wonderful activity that I want to cherish, but one that requires a lot of focus, energy, patience, and deep thought. It felt like the structure of well-thought-out events curated by Emily supplied the motivation, so I didn’t have to!
I was also immediately won over by Emily’s friendly but structured approach to moderating the events: having tried my hand at organising similar writing sessions since, I can attest that it’s much more difficult than it might seem! The combination of reflective exercises, gentle movement and stretching, emphasis on switching off phones and emails, taking short screen-free breaks, and taking the time to plan out writing tasks worked extremely well for me. It always allowed me to accomplish more in short, timed writing sessions than long, ill-defined days of writing had done in the past. The supportive, collegial atmosphere that Emily created meant that I also always left those events feeling calm, happy, and connected to other researchers. All in all, the programme has transformed my approach to writing, and I have been recommending it to students and colleagues left and right!

Right now, in these uncertain not-yet-post-Covid days, there’s more of a need than ever to join the dots between academic training and welfare.

To find out more about the options for your institution, contact emily.troscianko@gmail.com to arrange a time to talk.