Tips for increasing my writing speed?

If your review was good, than 3 hours is normal

With time you'll learn to research a lot quicker. When I did freelancing, I never remember taking 3 hours to right just one article, I'd say 30-40 minutes at most and that was on a difficult niche.

Maybe you're doing just a little too much research?

As for speeding it up, options such as voice recognition software arise, I have tried one but you'll need a good mic and need to train it to understand your voice which can take time you may not have. Hiring outsourcers is always an option, but then you need to make sure their work is up to the standard of your own if you want to maintain quality.

It depends how much you are getting paid per article.... if you are asking premium rates but are not familiar with the niche/subject area I would expect someone im paying top rates for to do whatever it takes to familiarize themselves with it.

While 3 hours is probably too long, as least next time you wont ve spending that long on it. You will get quicker with time/practice so its probably worth at least doing a few more and seeing how long it takes you after you have completed those.

Personally, I find it helps to make notes while researching; these then serve as sentences, bullet points or whatever for the main bulk of the article. Its easy enough to compose an interesting introduction and conclusion around the points, assuming you keep them related.

Of course, I should also point out that I am by no means a professional writer.

Thanks for the feedback. I can't afford Dragon right now but will look into it for the future. It doesn't sound like I am too out of whack for starting off.

Thanks again.

Ruth

Hi Ruth,

Do a search on this forum alone and you'll find a host of other threads with great advice detailing this very topic.

Why not start here:

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post1373838

Hope this helps and good luck.

Garry.

I am a writer. My advice: practice makes perfect! ;D

I don't use Dragon Naturally Speaking as it takes a long time for the software to get used to your voice. There are always a lot of mistakes I have to correct after using it. I find it faster just to write what I think. Just write, don't look back, don't check for mistakes until you finish the article, and then proofread. It took a lot of time for me at first, but with practice, your speed would increase considerably.

Thanks again everybody. And Garry thanks for the link.

Wow, How much do you charge. If you spend 3 hours on research I'd be happy to hire you to write my content lol.
But anyways the best thing is to write on topics and niches you know a lot about that way you cut down on research time. There are also many tools out there just search in this forum. I believe there was one call writing treasures or something which was a free WSO and it's a pretty good tool.

You can get Dragon Naturally Speaking from Amazon for less money. Most people only need the basic package which retails for about $100, but you can get it at Amazon for around $65.

The next package up retails for around $200, but after I bought it from Amazon, I was about to pay around $145, with rebate.

Dragon Naturally Speaking has sped up my writing dramatically.

The basic ways to speed up your writing are:

* Speed research.
* Type Faster.
* Spend less time editing.

;-)

I type about 90 wpm, although when I started, I was around 35 wpm. That has enabled me to cut a lot off the time scale.

The biggest advantage I have found is in speeding research. If you write about the same topic frequently, your past research will contribute to your ability to do future work without additional research. I have been ghost writing for ten years, so I can write some topics with no research at all.

Spending less time editing is another major speed boost for me. I typically write a 1000-word article in less than an hour. If I am writing for me, I spend up to 3-4 hours editing. For customers, I have disciplined myself to make only two editing passes on each article. That has helped considerably.

I hope this helps.

Part of getting faster with research comes down to recognizing what's a good source and what's not, along with choosing the right keywords to search for.

For example, let's say that you're trying to write an article about mortgages. If you search just "mortgage", you're going to get a lot of commercial sites for mortgage companies. What you want for your research is more information about mortgages. So, you should really be searching for "mortgage tips" or "mortgage information". Make your search as specific as possible.

Then, scan through the domains that show up in the search results. Sites that are .gov or .edu may be better resources. When trying to do factual research, you want to avoid article directory sites (ezinearticles.com, buzzle.com, goarticles.com). As time goes on, you'll recognize more of these. If you are doing subjective research though (tips on decorating), you can use those sources.

You can also limit your searches by site. To do this, you would add "site:.gov" (as an example) at the end of your search. So, if you wanted to know what the government has to say about mortgages, you would search "mortgage site:.gov" (without the quotes). You can also use this to search through a particular site only. For example, if you are writing health-related articles, you may want to search "diabetes site:mayoclinic.com", which would give you only results from the Mayo Clinic. If you were searching about gardening, you may want to search "plant transplanting site:bhg.com" which gives you only sites from Better Homes and Gardens.

If you're going to consistently write on the same topic, consider purchasing reference material for your home. For example, if you consistently write about home improvement projects, you may want a book from "This Old House". Check out garage sales for these types of books and you can find them for less than $1.

Additionally, as time goes on, you'll find that there are some topics that you personally simply cannot do without a buttload of research. I cannot write about golf or video games, for instance. Turn these topics down. It's not worth your time.

:-)

Hope that helps.

Love,
Shannon

Use more fingers when you type.



It seems like it's not the writing speed that is your problem,
it's speed-research.

Writing good, lucid content that punches through the apathy
of today's consumers is not easy. It's pretty demanding
actually. I don't know if you can get it in the UK, but the
book "Your Attention Please" is excellent.

Why I'm saying this is because if you're going to invest
time in researching and getting expertise like you clearly are
(which is good), you want your content to have more
punch than the average.

A lot of good points on speeding up the writing process and sticking with subjects that you know the most about is the way to go. Why take on a very technical subject, spend 3 hours to research it and wind up loosing money? Not worth it, when you could write 3 articles on a subject that you're somewhat already familiar with.

since you are new to article writing, it's quite normal to spend 3 hours in writing, but as time will passing you'll get much more better/faster, just don't give up.
that's good spent 3 hours and good way to learn to do it good
continue that way and you'll see, you will become faster.