10 Steps to Increase Your Writing Speed, Without Using AI

If I’m writing a personal essay, I take as much time as I like. I refine it repeatedly, making sure each word has just the right feel and flavor, and that I convey exactly the sentiment I want to convey to my reader. I’m going for emotional resonance in my essay. My writing pace is relaxed.

But when I work as a freelance writer, time is money, and I don’t like to waste money, I like to make money.

Sometimes I have a little race with myself to see just how high I can get my hourly rate. (I don’t charge by the hour — I charge by the project, so my hourly rate depends on my writing speed.)

To increase my hourly rate, I need to be as efficient as possible. I need to do everything I can to avoid wasting time.

After several years as a freelance writer, here are the systems and processes that help me achieve my best content writing in the shortest time:

Allow zero distractions

I don’t listen to music or have the TV on in the background. My phone automatically goes to “work mode” from 8 am to 4 pm so that only calls that may be emergent can come through. I use an app called Rescue Time to filter out any pop-up notifications on my computer.

Writing time is for writing. Period.

Set an intention using a template

I start with a template that guides the direction of my post or article. Here it is: “I’m writing for [who] about [subject] using [method]. For this post, the completed template would read, “I’m writing for newer content writers about efficiency using repeatable processes.”

Outline the post

Most for-the-web articles follow a similar format unless they’re listicles, so I making a copy of a Google Doc template as a starting point to save time. That template includes pre-filled formatting for this content:

1. Title
2. Intro paragraph
3. Crosshead 1
4. Body
5. Crosshead 2
6. Body
7. Crosshead 3
8. Body
9. Concluding paragraph

Use the verbal vomit method

For speed and efficiency, I use what I call the verbal vomit method. That means I free-write everything I want to say, without caring about grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, or research. I turn off all grammar checkers during this phase. They slow me down and distract me.

Clean it up

After I’ve written the body content, I go back and clean it up. This is where grammar and spelling checkers increase my speed. First, I go through and accept all spelling corrections. Then I make a second pass to consider whether I want to make any changes to sentence structure. I prefer ProWritingAid , but Grammarly will work too.

Research to back up my claims

Next, I my highlight all the facts in my work that need to be backed up by research, and I then find appropriate sources for those facts. Because I write in a fairly narrow niche, doing this after I write is faster and more efficient. I already know the facts, though I may not know the source at the time of writing.

If I’m unsure of the facts as I write but I know I want to include the data, I’ll put in a placeholder while I’m writing. For example, I might write, “X percentage of people with diabetes also have retinopathy.” That keeps my writing moving. Otherwise, if I stopped to research, I’d be a much slower writer.

After I’ve written my content, I use Ctrl-F to search for all the X’s in my post and fill in the correct data, backlinking to the sources I use.

Pro tip: Google Scholar allows me to keep lists of frequently used sources organized by category.

Fill in the crossheads

I want my crossheads (subheads) to tell a story to anyone who scans the post without reading the body. Since most internet readers scan first and then go back to read if they find value in the crossheads, the crossheads contain some of the most important words on the page. (Scan this post and you’ll see that you can get the general idea, even if you don’t read the full article.)

Write the concluding paragraph

Because I usually write healthcare content, I aim to sum it all up neatly in a way that leaves my reader hopeful and happy, and I often link to additional information about the same topic.

Choose a title

I write several titles until I iterate on one that includes the keyword and feels ‘right’ to me. When I first started as a writer, I ran my titles through the Co-Schedule Headline Analyzer and/or Advanced Marketing Institute’s Headline Analyzer to make sure they got a good score.

Wait!

Every post needs a little settling time. (Yes, I know I said time is money, but in this case, I’m working on something else for a few hours or even a day.)

After waiting a few hours to a day, I read the article out loud. Reading my post out loud helps me catch mistakes that I can’t spot if I just mentally read the post.

Submit

After that, I don’t continue to work until I think I’ve hit perfection — that’s a waste of time, which is a waste of money. I hit submit.

And then there’s an editor and sometimes a medical fact-checker on the other side. They read my post and sometimes they ask for changes. And that’s OK —in fact, it’s an efficient use of my time to make use of my editor’s skill. The editor’s job isn’t to put a seal of approval on a piece of content. Their job is to improve the content, so I’m glad for the feedback.

So that’s it, that’s the process I use to write quickly and efficiently as a seasoned healthcare content writer. I’m not completely against using AI to generate an outline, but I am entirely against using it to write full pieces of content. I can spot it from a mile away, and search engines are becoming more and more able to detect it as well.

More importantly, I have clients who don’t want any of their content to be AI-generated, and I’ve signed agreements to comply with that policy.

So despite all the hoopla about using AI, I’m still writing content the old-fashioned way. I’m not as fast as AI, but I’m pretty quick, and a whole lot better at it, if I do say so myself.