“Masterful writing” simply means writing that is done excellently at high speed. For example, a scientific article that’s written in 3 hours, is error-free, and is immediately accepted for publication is “masterful writing,” while a scientific article that takes 4 days to write, is turned in, and is sent back to the author with the notation, “Needs work,” is not.

   There are a number of good reasons why you should master writing. First, life today is fast-paced. We are living in an age of instant news, of rapid change, and of petaflops (1 quadrillion calculations per second), and being slow when you can easily be fast makes no sense. “Easily” is the second reason: mastering writing is easy, and anyone can do it. While mastering a new language can take years, you can literally start writing much more masterfully in an hour or so. Third and most important, becoming a masterful writer makes you a better scientist. I could write a whole book to explain the preceding sentence; but let’s get right into it, the topic of this blog, which is the “speed secrets” of writing mastery.

   The key to masterful writing of any kind, including scientific writing, is doing each one of the four (4) essential steps at the right rate of speed. The steps are thinking, composing, typing, and proofing. Each one of those four has its optimal speed, meaning the most desirable speed at which to do it.

   When people have trouble writing, it’s often nothing more mysterious or serious than trying to perform a particular step at the wrong rate of speed. For example, trying to compose at typing speed is virtually guaranteed to be disastrous, and so on. Simply doing each one at its optimal speed instantly makes you a more masterful writer.

The THINKING Step

Optimal Speed: slow

   In this first step, you get clear in your mind what you are going to write. People who have trouble writing frequently rush through this step. Basically, they just start writing; then they get lost, or confused; and for an article that should have taken 2 hours, they end up taking several days—and, much worse, the end result is almost guaranteed to be mediocre or unacceptable.

   You could visualize this step in travel terms: before you set off on a driving trip, you decide where you’re going to go, what you’ll want to take with you, etc.

   Going slow, taking the time to get everything clear—thinking, for example, “I’ll be writing in the third person,” “I’ll be writing for adult readers who know chemistry,” and so on, with as much precision as possible—virtually guarantees far quicker and better composing.

The COMPOSING Step

Optimal Speed: medium

   In this step, you pick up a pen (or pencil) and physically write. The key is always to do this step by hand. (I’m talking about writing for publication here—not emails or text messages). A great many people think it’s faster or better to compose on the keyboard, so they just skip this step and go straight to the next—and the end result is both far slower and mediocre or unacceptable. Why? Because composing is a creative activity and typing is a mechanical activity. Trying to do the two simultaneously is like attempting to frame a picture while you’re painting it.

   Worse, it’s like trying to accelerate a car while your foot is on the brake, because typing is optimally very fast and composing is optimally much slower. Composing speed is to typing speed as a stroll through a park is to a quick trip in your car to a convenience store: in the one, you savour; in the other, you care only about time spent and you miss all the sights and sounds.

   Here’s the thing: in any writing for publication, nobody cares how fast you wrote it. All that counts is what you wrote, its quality. That’s why the optimal speed for this step is medium: you take whatever time you need to get it right—and end up with excellent writing completed in far less total time because you don’t have to re-do it.

The TYPING Step

Optimal Speed: fast

   First, here’s some fun typing trivia: the longest English word typed by only your left hand is: stewardesses; the longest word typed by only your right hand is: lollipop; and the longest word typed by keys on only one row of the keyboard is: typewriter. Okay, now back on-track.

   People who type slowly almost always mentally spell each word as they type it. Coming to “the,” they tell their fingers to type “t, h, e.” Speed typists are simply people who have trained themselves to type without doing that. Typing at or near 2 words per second, 120 words per minute, you’ve escaped the “gravitational pull” of spelling mentally. The reverse is the secret: to escape that pull and become a speed typist, simply train yourself (in just a day or two) to avoid spelling each word as you type it.

   Here’s a way to do that. On your keyboard, type the suffix “ing” over and over until you’re doing it without thinking each time “i, n, g”; then do the same with a word, like “physics”; and again with a sentence, “The quick brown fox,” over and over (usually around 7 times), until you’re typing free from thought. Once you are doing that—typing at typing speed, not at spelling speed—you are, literally, a more masterful writer.

   How does that work—how does increased typing speed translate to increased quality? Three things. First, at high speed, you make far fewer errors. It’s an interesting phenomenon: the faster you go, the fewer errors you make. Second reason: keyboarding fast leaves you more time for the final crucial proofreading step. Third, keyboarding fast frees you from what I call “warthog love.” A mother warthog thinks her butt-ugly baby is the most beautiful creature on Earth—right? If it takes you a really long time to type something, then you are predisposed to find it acceptable, since the last thing you want to do is have to retype it. So typing fast gives you the freedom to be perfect.

   By the way, now you see why trying to combine the separate steps of composing and typing is virtually guaranteed to be disastrous. In composing, your mind is fully engaged; in typing, your mind is fully disengaged.

   And incidentally, having the mind disengaged is the ultimate goal in any form of mastery, from playing a piano to doing karate—you’re not a master until you’re doing it without thinking, “Which key do I hit next?” or “How do I do the next punch?”

   Speaking of karate, which has different coloured belts to rank mastery, typing mastery can be ranked by “typo registration time”—how many words you type before your mind registers that you hit a wrong key. When I’m typing, by the time I realize I’ve hit a wrong key, I have to go back eight (8) words to correct it. (That, by the way, is empirical proof that optimal typing speed is far faster than mental spelling speed, much less composing speed.)

The PROOFING Step

Optimal Speed: slow

   This last, tremendously important stage was detailed in my Blog No. 3 on Writing.

Perspective

   This blog has moved very fast through a great many topics, so please don’t hesitate to demand details on any point.

   I don’t want to leave you with the impression that the goal is super writing supersonically. That’s the ideal, not the goal. Writing fast is a luxury, but writing well is a necessity. Being a prolific writer is great—but only if you’re a perfect writer. To coin a phrase, sloppy writing can be hazardous to the health of a scientist’s career, and nobody really cares how long it took you to write a perfect paper.

   To make the point that, in writing, quality is more important than quantity (speed), let me leave you with a few facts from fiction for reflection.

   Kathleen Lindsay wrote 904 novels—and you’ve never heard of her. You’ve heard of Ernest Hemingway—and he wrote only 10 novels. For his best one, it took him a full year to write its 128 pages (less than 3 pages per day): The Old Man and the Sea, which won him both a Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

   One more example, from scientific writing. One of the most influential scientific papers of all time—the one in which Albert Einstein presented his equation, e = mc², which changed the world forever—was all of 3 pages long.

   [Einstein’s article, which enabled the Atomic Age, appeared on pages 639-641 in volume 18 of Annalen der Physik (1905): “Ist die Trägheit eines Körpers von seinem Energieinhalt abhängig?” (Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?).]