If you’ve been hanging around the world of internet marketing for a long time, you’ve come across people selling writing systems based on speed typing. They often make fantastic claims like Write your instruction book in 24 hours or less. Wow, that’s the name of my book. I am sorry. Actually, the big difference is that they claim their system works no matter what kind of book you’re writing. Therefore, titles are often along the lines of Write Any Book in 24 Hours or Less.
But what is speed typing and where does it come from? What are your advantages and disadvantages?
Speedwriting started from a journalistic stunt. Journalists write short pieces that follow a very specific template or pattern. They need to write quickly and produce a large amount of writing in a very short period of time. There is no place for writers block. Speed writing is a technique that focuses on those topics.
I apologize to my speed typing competitors, but here’s a ten second crash course on speed typing. Start by typing three words that describe your article. Two of them must be descriptive. For example, for this article you could have written “typing speed good bad”. That’s four words, I know. This is your title and subject. Now, as fast as you can, start typing. Don’t edit. Do not correct the errors. don’t stop just write. In five minutes, you will have written a page or two. Write as much as you can on that topic until the five minutes are up. Then it stops. That’s fast typing. The number of words in the sentence will vary from three to five. And the time will vary from two minutes to fifteen minutes. But you are always typing as fast as you can and no editing, even spelling mistakes are left.
Give it a try. If you occasionally suffer from writer’s block when trying to write your how-to book, you’ll find this to be a very useful tool. It’s a great way to start your writing day and get over writer’s block.
That is probably the biggest advantage of Speed Writing. It will help you get over writer’s block, which is really just the fear of starting to write. Starting the day with a writing exercise gets the craftsman’s juices flowing. The writing itself doesn’t matter, so whether it’s good or bad doesn’t matter. The point is to simply start writing.
The second advantage that Speed Writing has is that it helps us focus on a good habit for your writing. When writing a how-to book, it’s good practice to initially focus only on writing. Just write the words on the paper. The next day, before you start writing, reread what you wrote the day before. At that point, you can edit the spelling, grammar, and harshness. The result is that you can finish much faster since you won’t be tempted to overload your writing.
However, speed typing has a number of disadvantages when writing an instruction book. Instruction books must have a very strong structure. And writing any lengthy paper requires you to pre-structure it in order to be successful. Unfortunately, fast typing relies on typing without a network. The structure is not part of the technique. That causes several major disadvantages when writing how-to books and other long-form writing.
Because speedwriting is a technique that focuses on writing without thinking or structuring, it can result in going to uncharted places. When writing an instruction book, you can’t afford to write for writing’s sake. Everything on the page should be focused on furthering the purpose of the book. That means speed typing will often produce pages and pages of writing that are not suitable and unusable when writing an instruction book.
That also means that structural editing is required for a speed-written instruction book. Structural editing is the most expensive editing you can do, as the editor must rewrite entire sections of your book to improve comprehension and/or style. The cost of structural editing is often three times that of a simple stylistic or copy edit.
Finally, because speedwriting is unstructured, it doesn’t really help you write. Yes, it is focused on producing fast. Yes, it helps to focus your writing on the topic represented by the three-word phrase. However, paragraph by paragraph it doesn’t help you to know what you want to say for each paragraph, on each page and in each chapter.