Let me tell you about my friend, Mr Hemingway. He has helped me to learn to write fast.
Over the last year, I have become a better writer and improved my search engine rankings on my website. There’s a process I use for writing a clean manuscript. As in writing something that is editorially readable. On my blog platform, it scores me a ‘green’ for readability every time! My process is simple.
Learn to write fast by getting the first draft down
- Get all the ideas down and don’t worry too much about sentence length, grammar, or anything. I may have a rough outline, based around a keyword I have dug out through google.
- I write in word. I have editorial settings set high so that it catches as many things as possible.
- I go through the edit/proofread in Word. It’s quick. I also have the basic level (aka free) of Grammarly installed.
Mr Hemingway then helps me to write fast…
…by showing me where my writing could be tighter. Short sentences. Better sentence structure.
- I copy and paste the resulting text into the app called Hemingwayapp. (I don’t really know Mr Hemmingway… and the app just has his name! Clickbait). Again, it’s free. But this is more about getting a much cleaner style of writing. I want to reduce as many yellow and red highlights as
possible. I am a very wordy person, and sentences go mad. My friend calls it my corkscrew writing. There is a lot of rewriting usually. - Once I have run everything through Hemingwayapp, I paste it back into word. This time I go through and make sure it all makes sense. I add as many headings as I can. Then one more check through word’s own editor. It doesn’t take long, as I have done most of the rewriting now.
My lesser-known trick as I learn to write fast has been…
…to use my own website!
- I then paste the lot into my website, which has an SEO checker built into it. That then tells me if there are passages that are too long. Or if I’ve not varied my language enough. If I am writing for the website, I need links going out from the page as well.
- I can usually get greens right across the board. That is SEO and legibility. Upload with a simple photo which I build using a free photo, plus affinity photo editor as it is quick and easy. That’s for the website. Anything else I don’t worry about.
Hope that helps my fellow creatives. Do this and you’ll be amazed at the results. Particularly for writing.
