Emily T. Troscianko

LiveWrite is grounded in my experience creating and running the University of Oxford’s first writing program—the Baillie Gifford Writing Partnerships Programme for the Humanities Division—from 2018 to 2021, as well as over a decade of broader experience helping students and researchers enhance their personal happiness and academic success. My offerings draw on my expertise as a coach, accredited with the European Mentoring & Coaching Council at Senior Practitioner level, and on my academic track record, including a prestigious Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College, Oxford, coauthorship of the world’s leading textbook on consciousness, and publication of numerous other single- and coauthored papers in cognitive literary, health humanities, and clinical journals.

Read on for more about how I support students, researchers, and faculty with their academic writing, and why I do things the way I do.

Please get in touch via my contact form or by emailing emily [at] troscianko.com if you’re interested in collaborating.

If you’d prefer something on how to transform feelings of academic failure, either as it relates to academic writing or more generally, you can find out more on my failure page.

And for a light-hearted taster of my approach to the writing process, you could take a look at my illustrated Covid-era reflections on what repainting a 50-foot narrowboat can teach us about writing. [download: Writing-boats-and-painting-books_Troscianko-2021]

TESTIMONIALS FROM INSTITUTIONAL COLLABORATORS

The courses of Dr. Troscianko receive great evaluations and the cooperation is always reliable and constructive. She teaches scientists to become more effective writers.

Dr Daniel Kaping, Team Coordinator, Graduate School HIGRADE, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig, Germany

When a student is feeling anxious or low, they may struggle to get past imagined criticisms and find it difficult to find the motivation to get started with their work. This can have considerable knock-on effects on their academics and, very often, students find themselves in a challenging cycle of feeling rough, not being able to work, feeling worse, falling further behind, and so on. For the past three years, the Pembroke College Welfare Team have been working with Emily to customise Workshops that aim to address specific challenges that our students have identified through conversations with the Welfare Team and Academic Office. Examples of past workshops include “Stop Procrastinating and Get Started”, “Making the Most of Small Windows of Time”, “Midterm Writing Reset”, and “Making the Most of Your Vacation”. It is wonderful to have regular sessions to which we can direct students who seek out welfare or academic support, particularly when the students have noted challenges around mental health and motivation, focus, organisation and planning. Many students have reported that the sessions have transformed the way that they approach their work and significantly improved their work-life balance. We are exceedingly grateful to be able to offer students practical, solution-focused sessions that have such positive impact on how they feel about working and, consequently, the quality of the work that they are able to produce. 

Rebekah White, Welfare and Wellbeing Coordinator, Pembroke College, Oxford

THE LIVEWRITE PHILOSOPHY

It’s easy for instructors and advisors to concentrate on the content and assume that the processes will take care of themselves. A great deal of completely avoidable inefficiency and suffering are generated by this assumption.

What actually works is taking process seriously. Which means taking experience seriously, because attending to experience is our surest guide to getting processes good.

What works is, at its simplest and most concrete, making writing feel as nice as possible. And the way to achieve this is always a mixture of deeply predictable and highly specific. The predictables include:

• knowing what you’re doing at a high level (e.g. what this project is for),
• knowing what you’re doing at a low level (e.g. what the next half-hour is for),
• getting the bodily foundations (food/drink, sleep, movement) as good as they can be,
• working with your natural rhythms of energy and focus,
• getting other people usefully involved (or helpfully absent),
• and having a strategy for preventing and dealing with interruptions (especially the tech kind).

The specifics mean: everything that for a given individual is entailed by each of these category headers. 

In the writing workshops and courses that I’ve evolved over the years (and continue to), the design choices are intended to strike a balance between giving participants a chance to experience any variation on these core principles and giving them the invitation to start exploring their own variations right from the outset. This two-pronged approach creates a baseline of certainty overlaid with potential for individual experimentation; it creates a space for exercising personal agency, as well as clearly defined parameters in which to do so. 

I consider that the greatest favour I can do for anyone is to nurture their personal capacity to discover, decide, explore, and iterate, rather than expecting them to try and fail to fit themselves into someone else’s how-to guide. This priority matters especially for individuals who have experience of trauma, oppression, marginalization, and other forms of disempowerment, and I consider my experience-informed approach to writing support to be well aligned with trauma-informed pedagogical principles. As a visiting scholar with the Trauma-Informed Pedagogy at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2023-24, I learnt a lot about how to put such principles into practice, and why they matter. I am in the process of training with the nonprofit Somatic Experiencing to deepen my understanding of how to bring the magic of effective nervous-system regulation to bear in the academic context.

And I should add, in case it isn’t obvious, that no writing session is complete without doing some actual writing! I find that the prospect of making progress with a current project makes for a great incentive for individuals to sign up (and show up), and that doing so in the company of others with the same intention allows the principles and the practicalities to get through in a way they never could if it all stayed theoretical.

You can read more on my approach to designing and running writing workshops and courses here.

THE PRACTICALITIES

On every scale from a 1-hour writing breakfast to a 2-week writing reset, and from an 8-week ”Write a thesis chapter in a term” course to a 6-month writing and peer-coaching program, I have extensive experience in creating protected conditions for real writing and thinking to happen and for working habits to be lastingly enhanced. Group sessions typically include exploratory activities, preparatory writing exercises, timed writing sessions, systematic planning and review, physical movement, and screen-free breaks. The idea is not to encourage participants to get as much writing done as possible (though people are often amazed by how much they produce); the point is to help individuals discover ways of working that are truly effective, efficient, and intentional.

To happen efficiently, this kind of discovery requires a decisive departure from the norm, and especially from our habits of being indiscriminately available to other people (e.g. via our phones and inboxes). Withdrawal from connectivity and from many other default modes can be uncomfortable at first, but it tends to result in more enjoyable experiences as well as better payoffs for the projects we care about. And so the new structures can quickly become self-sustaining. Habits never really change without a hedonic payoff that makes the new version feel better than the old, so I’m uninterested in the misleading masochism of “willpower” and very interested in precisely where the “gosh, this is rather nice” kicks in.

Environment matters; it’s one of the most often ignored aids—and blocks—to effective habit change. For in-person events, an attractive and unfamiliar venue (to pleasantly heighten the defamiliarization) and catering for refreshments (to free everyone from other decision-making) are helpful. For online formats, participants are asked to commit to minimizing distractions as far as is feasible, to take the time to make their physical environments as conducive to focus as possible, and to plan for food and drink in advance to help make our time together enjoyable as well as useful.

All my offerings can be run via Zoom or in person, and all work as self-contained offerings or as part of a longer-term program of support. I’m most experienced in working with graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, but have also tailored what I offer to undergraduates and more senior researchers and faculty. This can be a powerful experience for anyone for whom writing or other cognitively difficult activities are an important part of professional life.

I often combine writing courses with short 1-1 coaching sessions for participants, to help them deepen their insights and refine their plans alongside the group sessions. For example, a 30-minute session for each participant scheduled the week after the event or course can be a great way to ensure that what they’re learning in the group sessions is effectively adapted and applied to the specifics of their own life right now. In the 1-1 session, we might go deeper into the individual’s aspirations for writing/work/life improvement and the primary obstacles (practical and/or psychological) that the course so far has revealed as standing in the way of achieving that change. We might review what’s been showing promise from their course-related experiments so far and come up with adjustments to give meaningful change the best possible chance of really happening. The methods I apply during the consults build on years of experience as a coach (for both academic clients and clients with eating disorders) focused on enabling the people I work with to achieve powerful and lasting change in the areas they care about most.

Beyond the core elements just mentioned, optional elements include:

• in-depth guidance on the principles of good writing and of successful habit change
• deeper introductions to mindfulness, somatic awareness, posture, and stretching
• life-admin sessions in which we apply appropriate principles and structures to approaching all the little things that otherwise don’t get done, create stress, and interfere with longer-term writing projects
• work-sharing sessions for participants to read aloud or otherwise present their work in progress, in a range of formats depending on purpose (from how to give a good presentation to overcoming obstacles in thinking or writing)
• career-focused sessions to encourage clear and imaginative thought and planning about next steps
• structured follow-up to support learning and goal-setting for lasting habit change.

I use the writing sessions to do my own writing too; one reason I love running these events is that I always come away from them with some writing done. My priority, though, is making sure that everyone else has what they need to write with purpose and focus and perhaps even some joy. If the event is in person, I remain attentive to the dynamics in the room throughout, and wander round now and then to check what’s on people’s screens (I find that this efficiently combats any annoying desires to just quickly check Instagram!). If we’re on Zoom, I encourage participants to private message me if they need anything, and we can set up a breakout room if it helps to chat something through. This combination of facilitating whilst also partaking in the goal-setting and writing allows me to model the value of the approach and create a feeling of solidarity.

The intensity of these sessions is sometimes not easy for participants to adjust to, and I make clear that I am always available to step outside (physically or virtually) for a chat if something difficult is coming up. My coaching expertise then comes into its own in an accelerated process of identifying the problem and whatever kind of solution is needed and possible for right now.

Overall, my methods help participants discover what might change in their lives if they gave more curious attention to minutiae—including how that might free their minds to think big exciting thoughts that would otherwise never emerge. This interplay between the big and the small picture, the joining of the dots between behavioural, bodily, and intellectual, gives these courses and workshops a particular kind of quiet excitement.

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THE FORMATS

Writing sprint

A 1-week sprint designed to help participants bring a writing project to completion by the end of Friday afternoon. Individuals get to define finished, but it must involve sharing their completed piece with a specified other person.

With a focus on addressing guilt, panic, and overwhelm and replacing them with more writing-conducive feelings, we start by identifying psychological and practical obstacles to completion and how they can be overcome. Then we specify the remaining work to do on a project, work on splitting up tasks into small manageable chunks, and get used to the feeling of setting achievable goals and meeting them. A detailed shared spreadsheet template is provided for you to track your progress and generate data on the completion process to feed into future planning.

We meet on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to create and sustain momentum for the week, and everyone is assigned a sprint partner to generate extra support beyond our sessions.

You can read more about this, one of my favourite event formats, here.

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Writing reset

This 2-week course is designed to help researchers understand and test out the power of small changes to daily routines in shaping the structures of their professional and personal life, with a focus on their academic writing practice.

Week 1 involves four meetings (on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday), offering elements including:

• the foundations of good writing
• your real versus ideal working day, how to plan your day
• designing an ideal morning routine, and making it happen
• your reasons for writing (intrinsic and extrinsic), and how to optimise for them
• principles of effective habit change for work/life habits and academic writing 
• how to set up and perform a behavioural experiment to enhance something you love about writing
• group and breakout exercises to prepare you mentally and physically for writing
• timed distraction-free writing sessions with the group, each with planning, review, and screen-free breaks
• weekly reviews including reflection and planning
• troubleshooting Q&A

Week 2 starts with a final group meeting, offering a last shared writing session plus an introduction to writing technique focused on any one of the following topics:

• generating and developing good research questions
• transitioning from reading to writing
• structuring/organising
• generating first drafts
• revising and editing
• cutting words
• enhancing your writing style
• optimizing (inter)disciplinary framing
• managing coauthoring
• dealing with feedback on your writing

The rest of Week 2 offers each participant a 30-minute 1-1 coaching session with a collaborative session summary (written by the researcher, with comments and additions from me) on anything writing- or habit-related, as well as check-in emails to keep participants on track, and contact with their course partner(s). This week’s focus is on helping participants incorporate week 1’s learning into their everyday life, and keep writing central in their week.

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How to work (and live) well

Working habits tend to accrete in haphazard ways, many of which serve neither us or our work very well. This session invites you to turn a critical eye on your own routines and introduces you to ways of optimizing them. The 3.5-hour event includes the following components:

1. mapping out the multiple roles our lives involve and joining the dots to explore how these give rise to goals that matter to us, which in turn generate the specific tasks and activities we give our time and energy to
2. reviewing a pre-completed activity tracking template to generate personalized insights into the current contributions of urgency versus importance to everyday decision-making and time management
3. learning the essentials of developing a strong personal practice in crucial work/life domains such as: scheduling, time chunking, goal-setting, rewards, distraction reduction, breaks, ruthlessness versus flexibility, and zooming out and back in;
4. inquiring into feelings of academic failure and impostor syndrome and trying out practical strategies for transforming them.

The session can also be expanded to include elements such as:

• imagining your ideal working day, and devising strategies for bringing the reality closer to it
• investigating how long basic tasks (everyday and academic) actually take, and trying out methods for getting better at predicting and planning
• diving into difficulties and solutions specific to academic writing

Participants come away with clear appreciation of the reality that their everyday habits are 1) the prime determinant of the kind of life they lead and the achievements they are re capable of and 2) eminently adjustable through a simple process of trial and error accompanied by structured observation and systematic adjustment. In other words: Habits matter, and we can change them!

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I offer a range of other multi-session courses, including:

• Zooming out on your writing practice: What, why, how? Rethink and redesign your writing (academic and other) from the ground up.
• How to have a great summer. Learn and put into action a four-layered life design system: making a weekly plan that honours your intentions for the summer, making daily plans in line with your weekly priorities, and setting session goals aligned with your plans for the day.

And finally, I like designing and running short and sweet online options such as:

• An hour-long “writing wake-up” (around 8:30-9:30 a.m., or earlier) including a 40-minute writing session with goal-setting and review as well as some targeted input around writing and daily habits, plus a little invigorating movement.
• 2-hour “writing drinks” (alcohol optional, water forbidden; best on a Friday early evening!) to make creative use of potentially dead time, with light-touch planning and review plus the fun of seeing who‘s brought what drink and why, and what kinds of project and goal-setting work best for at this point in the day and week.

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FEEDBACK FROM PARTICIPANTS

From Baillie Gifford Writing Partnerships Programme participants (2018 to 2021)

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!

The boot camp had many benefits small and larger. Many thanks for the reminder about setting a principle to follow this term. The structuring and goal setting provided both a window into my overestimation of what was achievable and the opportunity for reflection to adjust and learn. Good stuff!

Now that I’ve discovered the writing groups, I feel much better about writing in general—bootcamp changed my perspective on writing quite a lot! Thanks for running it!

I found Emily’s session over the past two Mondays very helpful.  In fact, it has helped me to restructure my working day so that I can be more productive! Her approach to studying is far more holistic than I have ever experienced before, with far more of a focus on you as a person and your motives, rather than just as a robot trying to meet a deadline! The sessions have been a big help for me in understanding my motivations and writing habits. I am hoping to continue some form of informal writing accountability with those I met over the past few weeks. (Nathan Dunn)

I attended one of Emily’s Writing Breakfasts with a view to breaking a deadlock in my writing process—in this instance, the difficulty of moving from short-form, quick-reward pieces (articles, chapters) to a long-form, deferred-reward piece (a monograph). While I expected to gain value from the experience—and I did—the value very much exceeded these expectations. Re-learning what it means to write in a space that is expressly designed for it made clear to me that I had not alone been (unwittingly) sabotaging my writing, but also wasting the time that I had set aside for it by using it unproductively. A second unexpected insight came from learning that writing can be a communal process. Accustomed to pursuing writing as a solitary activity, writing in a structured way with others made evident to me how much more productive it is possible to be when participating in a collective enterprise. I have secured a writing partner from the workshop, and hope to work with them in the future to our mutual benefit. Finally, I must record that Emily’s physical exercise routines brought about a very welcome intrusion of blue skies and green grass into the stark black and white of the empty page! (a first-time participant in a writing breakfast)

From other course participants

I cannot thank you enough for such a fantastic course over the past couple of weeks. I feel more patient with myself, and a sense of achievement even on days when I have chosen to do just one or two things (and even including non-work-related things). I felt listened to; you were so kind and patient, generous with your time and advice, and the level and manner of engagement (the mixture of direct questions/chat responses, occasional spoken answers, and the breakout rooms) was certainly perfect for me (I don’t think I have ever attended such a well-organised online course, nor one which so seamlessly kept my attention throughout). I refer to the handouts, and the pieces of advice from your emails, every day. The fact that I have a summer plan at all – and one which now feels like it might be achievable—in itself is an amazing feeling! (“How to have a great summer” course, 2022)

This was by far the best course I have taken over the course of my PhD through graduate school. Your holistic approach was extremely helpful to me for different facets of work and life. (Toni Schmidt, PhD student in Remote Sensing, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, after the “Writing Reset” course, 2023)

I signed up for Emilys course “Writing Reset” to get new inspiration on how to write effectively, improve my writing output and routines and hopefully establish it as a more delightful and natural process. The course indeed helped me in that but actually it went beyond my expectations, Emily provided several methods and ways of thinking to effectively reflect and adapt routines accordingly, also both personal and work related. One specific example: I am trying to set goals (weekly and daily for now) more specific and realistic and expectations to myself of what I can achieve and more clearly define priorities. This has helped me to be generally more satisfied with the achievements at the end of the day, although it does not work every day, I am more positive about it and continously learning. It also gave an appreciation of this continous learning: “It does not have to be the best way yet, but why shouldn’t it become?”. Emily helped me to adapt more a perspective of discovery and less pressure. Thank you—Emily! (Pia, postdoc, after the “Writing Reset” course, 2025)

Please drop me a note me via the contact form if you’re interested in running a course or workshop based on any of these formats, or would like to talk through any ideas of a different kind. I’d love to hear from you.