Is it okay to use a personal essay writing service just to overcome writer's block?

[HurtBreaker]

this might sound like a weird question, but hear me out. I'm an art history major, so writing is literally my entire life. I actually love it normally. But this semester, I've hit the mother of all writer's blocks. I have this paper due on Baroque sculpture, and every time I open my laptop, my mind just goes completely blank.

It's like someone erased my creativity. I know the material, I have my sources, I have my thesis... but I cannot, for the life of me, turn it into actual sentences and paragraphs. It's been three weeks of staring at a blinking cursor.

I'm genuinely considering using a personal essay writing service not to write the whole paper for me, but just to... I don't know, prime the pump?

Like, what if I paid someone to write just the introduction and first body paragraph? Something to get the ball rolling, to give me a template to react to and build upon. I feel like once I have something to work with, even if it's not perfect, my own ideas will start flowing again.

It would be like a creative jumpstart. But is that cheating? It feels different from just outsourcing the whole thing. It's more like hiring a brainstorming partner who also happens to write. Has anyone ever used a service this way? Just to break through a mental block, not to avoid the work itself?

I'd love to know if it helped or if it just made me feel even more stuck and dependent.

 

[SarahJones]

If you pay someone to write a "starter" paragraph, and then you use that to build your own paper, where does YOUR work begin? If the core ideas, the argument structure, the analytical framework come from the paid writer, are you really writing the paper? Or are you just... editing someone else's work?

I think the line is murkier than people admit. If the service is just giving you a template (like, literally "here's how you might structure an introduction about Bernini"), that's different from them writing original analysis you then build on. But most services don't do "templates"—they do writing.

For Baroque sculpture specifically, maybe watch a few YouTube lectures first? Seeing someone else TALK about the material can jumpstart your brain in ways that reading doesn't. Dr. Vida Hull's lectures on Italian Baroque are amazing and free.