6 August 2020

Thoughts on Speed Writing

by Rachel Shu

Status: finished
Meaningfulness: forgettable

A friend of mine used to ghostwrite papers. As I recall, they could turn out 2 or 3 essays a day, equivalent to 20 or 30 pages. If I had to write that much per day, how would I do it?

Don’t focus on generating new insights.

I’m sure I would end up making some along the way.
Very little is new under the sun. Often the point of writing is only to show understanding, or quality of thought.

Minimize research time.

Prioritize finding relevant sources and cap at a certain limit. These are not exhaustive academic papers for publication.
Focus on abstracts, or topic paragraphs, and hunt for quotes in the rest. Don’t try too hard to understand.

Outline to a general template.

I hated templates and tried to abandon them; I’d find a sturdy but flexible one if I was under time-pressure.

Practice and practice and practice.

Doing it day after day would certainly help; writing to a deadline might be necessary.
I haven’t done well with the kind of deadlines and unserious consequences I have let myself have in the past.

Minimize distractions.

I would cut other tasks to a minimum, try to knock it out as early in the day as I could. It becomes like a job - no time off to cook lunch, eat a sandwich and get back to work.

I don’t plan to ever write that much per day. But even if I only write for 2 hours a day, I could probably hit 5 medium-quality pages per hour, by focusing on efficiency. I’ll try to do that - after all, quantity becomes quality.

tags: meta