If you have been around the internet marketing world for a long time, you have come across people selling writing systems based on speed writing. 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 that their system works no matter what kind of book you are writing. Therefore, the titles are usually in the line 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?

The speed writing started from a journalistic stunt. Journalists write short articles 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 room for the 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 speed-writing course. Start by writing three words that describe your article. Two of them must be descriptive. For example, for this article you could have written “write speed, good, bad.” That is four words, I know. This is your title and subject. Now, as fast as you can, start typing. Do not edit. Do not correct the errors. Do not stop. Only 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 is speed writing. The number of words in the phrase will vary from three to five. And the time will vary from two minutes to fifteen minutes. But he is always typing as fast as he can and does not edit, even spelling errors remain.

Give it a try. If you occasionally suffer from writer’s block when trying to write your instruction book, you will find it a very useful tool. It’s a great way to start your writing day off and get over writer’s block.

That is probably the biggest advantage of Speed ​​Writing. It will help you overcome writer’s block, which is really just the fear of starting to write. Starting the day with a writing exercise, get 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 start writing.

The second advantage of speed writing is that it helps us focus on a good habit for your writing. When writing an instruction book, it is good practice to focus only on the writing initially. Just write the words down on a piece of paper. The next day, before you start writing, reread what you wrote the day before. At that time, you can edit the spelling, grammar, and roughness. The result is that you can finish much faster as you won’t be tempted to work too hard on writing.

However, speed typing has a number of disadvantages when writing an instruction book. Instruction books should have a very solid structure. And writing any long job requires you to pre-structure the job to be successful. Unfortunately, fast writing relies on writing 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 speed writing is a technique that focuses on writing without thought or structure, it can result in going off into the wild unexplored. When writing an instruction book, you cannot afford to write just for the sake of writing. Everything on the page should be focused on promoting the purpose of the book. That means speed typing will often produce pages and pages of writing that are unsuitable and unusable when writing an instruction book.

That also means that a structural edit is required for an instruction book written with speed writing. Structural editing is the most expensive editing you can do, as the editor is faced with rewriting entire sections of his book to improve comprehension and / or style. The cost of the structural edit is often three times that of a simple stylistic or style edit.

Finally, because speed typing is unstructured, it doesn’t really help you type. Yes, it is focused on producing quickly. 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 know what you want to say for every paragraph, on every page, and in every chapter.