Your ability to write quickly is essential because content is king online - and offline too. As the Web becomes more competitive, site owners and businesses realize that the more content on their site, the better. Additional pages provide additional access points for site visitors.



Those additional pages are often in the form of articles, so if you can provide articles fast on demand, you're golden.

I separate the planning stage of writing from from the drafting and straight writing stages, not only for speed, but also because each stage of the writing process demands a different mind state. Since it takes around ten to 15 minutes or switch from one mind state to another, separating planning from the other stages makes sense, speed-wise.

Writers often worry that quality will suffer when they write faster. Paradoxically, the opposite is true. When you separate the writing stages, and write FAST at EVERY stage your article quality improves. Try it and see.

Please realize that all writing is experiential - you learn by doing. You'll need to follow the process below at least four times to get accustomed to it. By the fifth time you use it, the process will be part of you, and will help you to speed up all the writing you do, no matter what you're writing.

Here we go:

1. Fill in Who, What, etc

Rudyard Kipling's Six Honest Serving men are the writer's best friend. Kipling wrote: ?I keep six honest serving men: They taught me all I knew: Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who?.

So write down the page, in a list: What, Why, When, How, Where, Who.

Let's see how this works. I'll use this article as an example.

What - write articles fast.

Why - speed is essential for Web and other writers too.

When - every day.

How - planning, one of the elements of fast writing.

Where - Web and print.

Who - Writers.

Using the Six Honest Serving gives you something useful: your article's title. You can see that I created this article's title from "What", and "How" above. It also gives you pegs on which you can hang the entire article.

2. Create a mind map or cluster diagram

Next, I create a mind map or cluster diagram on an index card. I date the card, and keep it - old cards often provide the seeds of new articles.

For this article, I created a cluster diagram with the "write articles fast" phrase centered and circled on the card. Around this central phrase, I wrote and circled other points: "fast", "Web writers", "speed", "every day", "planning", "writers", and "Web and print".

3. Write a rough draft

I actually created the cluster diagram for this article several weeks ago, so because I knew what I wanted to say, the writing of the article has taken around 15 minutes.

Your rough draft is fast. Don't worry about word choice, or even grammar. Just write whatever comes into your head, glancing at your mind map or cluster when you get stuck.

Write more than you need - you can cut later.

4. Final copy

A day or two later, look over your rough draft and revise it. Cut it down, add information, move paragraphs around and improve your word choice.

For a print article, you may want to do another fast draft or two - or not.

For the Web, your article should be in good shape by now. You're done.