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  • Joined: March 4, 2023
  • Articles: 272

How to Get Unstuck: Working Through Academic Writing Blocks

You sit down to write. You open the document. You reread the last paragraph you wrote, change two words in it, change them back, and then check your email. An hour later nothing has moved.

Almost every academic I work with knows this experience, and most of them privately believe it says something damning about them. It doesn't. Scholarly writing has structural features that make it unusually easy to stall in — the standards are high and largely tacit, the feedback is delayed and often harsh, the projects are long enough that no single day matters, and nobody ever explicitly taught you how to do it. A block is what happens when those conditions meet an ordinary human attention span. It is a solvable problem, and this piece is about how.

Five Reasons You Think You Don’t Need This

I lost most of a year to a filing system.

Not to the system itself — to its absence, and then to my elaborate attempts to build one after the fact. I had the notes. I had read the things. What I did not have was any record of why I had made the choices I had made eighteen months earlier, and so I spent months reconstructing my own reasoning from fragments, badly, under deadline. Every one of those months was avoidable. I did not avoid them because I had never seriously considered that a person of my competence would need infrastructure. Infrastructure was for people who struggled.

That belief cost me a year, and I meet it constantly in other academics, so let me take it apart properly. Here are the five things people say when I suggest they need scaffolding for their research, and why each of them is wrong.

What the Evidence Actually Says About Neurodivergent Workplace Adjustments

Give an autistic employee the quiet, private workspace they asked for, and there is a documented chance you will make things worse. Not because the quiet was wrong. Because being moved to a room away from everyone else read as exclusion rather than support.

That finding sits inside a systematic review of physical workplace adjustments for neurodivergent workers by Clara Weber and colleagues, published in Applied Psychology: An International Review. It is worth sitting with, because it breaks the logic that most neurodivergent workplace adjustments are built on: identify the sensory problem, apply the matching fix, close the case.

This post covers what that review found, why its single most generalisable result is the one nobody puts on an accommodations list, and how to run the conversation differently if you are a neurodivergent researcher asking for something, or the person being asked.

Why Academia Keeps Failing Neurodivergent Researchers (And What the Evidence Says About Fixing It)

The further you go in academia, the less support you get. Undergraduates have study skills centres, structured timetables, and someone whose job is to notice when they fall behind. By the time you are a PhD researcher, most of that scaffolding is gone. You are expected to just know how things work.

For neurodivergent researchers, that quiet withdrawal of support is where the trouble starts.

How Can Dissertation Writing Support Help You Succeed?

Writing a dissertation is one of the most demanding challenges in academic life. Many doctoral candidates find themselves stuck, overwhelmed, or doubting their ability to finish. If you're struggling to make progress on your dissertation, you're not alone. Research shows that nearly 50% of doctoral students never complete their degrees, often abandoning their work during the writing phase. Dissertation writing support offers structured guidance, accountability, and proven strategies to help you move from confusion to completion. Whether you're facing methodology questions, writer's block, or simply need someone to keep you on track, targeted support can transform your experience and help you reach your goals with confidence.

How to Overcome Academic Writing Blocks and Reclaim Your Productivity?

Academic writing blocks affect nearly 70% of PhD students at some point during their studies, according to research from the Journal of Educational Psychology. You sit down to write, stare at the blank page, and feel that familiar wave of anxiety wash over you. Your deadline looms, your ideas feel scattered, and the cursor blinks mockingly on an empty document. This experience isn't a personal failing. It's a common challenge that even accomplished researchers face, and more importantly, it's one you can overcome with the right strategies and support.

How to Navigate Your Academic Career with Confidence

Academic careers rarely move in a straight line. Maybe you're just starting a PhD. Maybe tenure is approaching and the stakes feel higher than ever. Maybe you're questioning whether academia is still the right fit at all. Whatever the stage, the path can feel isolating, and the silence around that isolation is part of the problem: imposter syndrome, burnout, and uncertainty rarely get discussed openly, even though they're common. The good news is that the right guidance changes this. Academic career coaching provides clarity, structure, and strategies built around your actual goals, not a generic template.

From Waiting for Tenure to Building on Her Own Terms: A Postdoc’s Career Reinvention

When Sarah first reached out, she had everything that looked like progress on paper. Three years into her postdoc at a well-regarded European research institution, she had publications, a growing network, and a supervisor who respected her work. By most external measures, she was doing well.

But in our first session, she said something I'd heard before, though it never gets easier to hear: "I'm waiting for tenure. I feel stuck." Every time someone says it, the same quiet resignation comes through — the sense of someone who has handed the steering wheel of their career to a system that was never built to hand it back.

How to Launch a Successful Academic Research Career?

Starting your academic research career can feel like standing at the base of a mountain without a map. You know the summit exists, but the path forward seems unclear, and every decision carries weight. Early career researchers often face this uncertainty alone, wondering if they're making the right choices or if there's a better way to build their foundation. The good news is that launching a successful research career doesn't require perfection—it requires structure, guidance, and the confidence to take that first step. With the right approach and support, you can transform confusion into clarity and build a research career that reflects your vision and strengths.