How fast can you write?

I discovered that if I am doing quality academic writing I write one page per hour, almost exactly. This makes timing an x-page paper incredibly convenient if I already know, in general, what I'm going to say.

if im working off an outline than pretty fast - probably three or four pgs/hour - if not then ??????

when i am in the zone that is exactly the schedule i run on

xp

then again, i haven't had to write anything that required actual drafts in like years

i used to be fast, but since the stuff i'm saying got really complicated (i.e. probably wrong), it's agony. it's a good day if i do a page. i need to speed up for the thesis. i'm writing job proposals at the moment. they are typically ~3 days, and in principle i'm not writing from scratch. but they still take me a full day.

lol i write sooooo slow. like sometimes 2 pages per day. law school exams i got up to like 5-6 pages per hour though but i was just dumping my brain out pretty much

If I have to write a cover letter or application-type letter the pace FEELS like one sentence per year.

I'm working on an essay this weekend. Once I have an idea where the next several paragraphs are going I can write a page, undistracted by ILE or music, in half an hour.

Job application covering letters = written slower than a child's Christmas thank-you note

they are typically ~3 days, and in principle i'm not writing from scratch. but they still take me a full day.

― caek, Sunday, November 29, 2009 11:11 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

typically 3 pages

I'm working on an essay this weekend. Once I have an idea where the next several paragraphs are going I can write a page, undistracted by ILE or music, in half an hour.

― Hell is other people. In an ILE film forum. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, November 29, 2009 6:15 PM (56 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this seems about right.... when im actually writing i can do a page in 20-30 minutes btu the amount of time it takes me to actually open up the fuckin word processor and start typing is so long i probably average around an hour a page all told

The typing part is easy, but the iterative editing & rewrites take a while.

Also, i thought this thread was about writing by hand.

I write painfully, painfully slow... a page an hour would be fast. And that's for undergrad fluff, I'm terrified of what grad school papers might be like. Usually I don't have to spend so much time revising, though, which is nice.

For academic papers once I get going I write really quickly - probably around 3-4 pages an hour. I tend to just write first and then edit/think later.

If I have to write a cover letter or application-type letter the pace FEELS like one sentence per year.

― mascara and ties (Abbott), Sunday, November 29, 2009 6:15 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

Yeah, I hate these type of things.

It's the getting started that was always a problem for me. I would routinely put off starting papers until around 11 or 12 the night before they were due and then be up most of the night finishing them. I know it normally sounds like BS when ppl say they work best under pressure but I honestly do think that is true for me.

depends on how big a filter I put on my brayne...when I am moved by the muse I can do 3-4 pages an hour (double spaced tho)

xp for my freshman year I took a class where you had to turn in 5-6 page paper every Friday, I think I pulled all nighters for nearly all of them for no good reason

one of my better classes required fast and loose two pagers every Friday, which alleviated a lot of stress and made writing much easier. vs the usual 3 papers a quarter thing

YES!! I had a class that had a similar requirement and I loved it.

I also tend to write really concisely so most of my papers always wound up at least a couple pages shorter than the recommended length. This made me love the two pg thing even more.

i wrote so slow in undergrad i would just turn in like 7 pages when 10 was required because it was just torture to me

Do you like writing? I really love it and used to think I'd go into academia or actually be a writer so I think the fact that I enjoy it so much helps as far as writing speed is concerned. I would rather write a 15 page paper than take an exam any day.

i fucking hate writing, so much so that this thread title produced a fight-or-flight reflex. :/ i am basically this:

i wrote so slow in undergrad i would just turn in like 7 pages when 10 was required because it was just torture to me

― harbl, Sunday, November 29, 2009 8:14 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Horseshoe what are you in school for? I swear I thought it was for lit or something like that.

i thought this would be a question about how fast your handwriting is, cuz mine is hell of slow

i quit! but it was for lit. i know, i am a moron.

i hate writing but i can crank out something dry and full of information pretty quickly. anything too liberal arts-y i can't really do

Aw stop HS, you're not a moron! I didn't realize that you'd quit. This probably happened ages ago. I'm a little slow on the uptake sometimes.

I also thought this was about handwriting at first. I'm really slow at that but only because I'm weirdly anal about my handwriting.

actual conversation with my advisor in grad school, while i was preparing for oral exams:

"i'm actually kind of psyched for this, because no writing!"

"if you hate writing, maybe you should do something else."

...

i fucking hate writing, so much so that this thread title produced a fight-or-flight reflex. :/ i am basically this:

i wrote so slow in undergrad i would just turn in like 7 pages when 10 was required because it was just torture to me

― harbl, Sunday, November 29, 2009 8:14 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

― horseshoe, Monday, November 30, 2009 9:17 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

^^ describes me to a tee

x-post LOLLLLLL

i really want to like writing. but it makes me feel stupid and like people reading my stuff would laugh. my style is pretty good wrt legal stuff but otherwise i'm like, why am i even trying to explain this to someone else if i already know it? and i feel like i've done a good enough job in 4 sentences

horseshoe otm re: fight-or-flight response to writing. In college my rate was also a page per hour, but this could only occur if I had precisely the number of hours until the deadline as I had pages to complete. If I started any earlier than that, I would dilly-dally and fret and edit and delete until I arrived at that time, after which I would write furiously and hatefully and want to kill myself.

This has not improved in the intervening years, for example NaNoWriMo ends in like 30 hours and I still have 17K to go.

btw i pretty much always got an A with my 7/10 pages so i must be doing something right?

you are an excellent internet messageboard prose stylist!

LOLLLLLLLL

I think one of the mistakes a lot of ppl make is adding a lot of fluff just to meet some length requirement so your 7/10 pagers are probably just more to the point and devoid of all the bullshit that others might include.

my writing accelerates on like a perfect curve as the deadline approaches--i can do 3 pgs an hour if it's the last hour i have to work on something.

In college my rate was also a page per hour, but this could only occur if I had precisely the number of hours until the deadline as I had pages to complete. If I started any earlier than that, I would dilly-dally and fret and edit and delete until I arrived at that time, after which I would write furiously and hatefully and want to kill myself.

this is 1000000% otm. i have, i'll confess, done this with med school exams a few times. h'mmm? exam at 9am and i have ten lectures to cover? subtract 4-5 hours for sleep, one for breakfast/transit, and an hour per lecture and there's your start time

No criticism of anyone's method intended, but sleep matters too much for me to lose it writing. I've never pulled an allnighter. My own enjoyment of the writing and research aside, I care too much about my leisure time to expend it with work, so I start early, which allows me to listen to music, goof off on ILM, have drinks, and so on.

the best profs handed out assignments based on word count, anyway

i mean alfred of course you're correct, which is why everytime i was jamming on a paper at 4am i was like 'wtf is rong with you'

never done an all-nighter either. would routinely finish assignments around 2 am the night before

i have pulled maybe 5 ACTUAL all-nighters in my 6.5 years of higher education. like, w/o any sleep at all, or w/a one hour nap or something. as recently as last week iirc :-/

I couldn't even count the number of times I stayed up all night. I'm a really shitty student as far as study habits and time management are concerned which is one of the main reasons I think I'm done with school at this point.

pretty fun to pull all nighters with your bros who are doing the same assignment, real brolike

i swear this last one was the last. I SWEAR

yeah. suuuuuuuuuure.

haha yeah, that's the other thing: i've had some all-nighters where i passed thru the looking glass at 4am or something and was all "i got this" and then kinda enjoyed getting a soda or a cigarette at the crack of dawn, and seeing all the other idiot zombies on the same trip

dude gbx in my 2 years of pre i pulled maybe 4 or 5 all nighters before tests, no biggie. havent done it this year yet but got awfully close, slept on a couch in the pharm building for 3 hrs from 3-6 before an 8am exam

i feel sick to my stomach if i sleep less than 6 hours. i'm a total wimp.

i slept on a couch outside the pathology lab last year

best almost-all-nighter moment was riding my bike to school in a blizzard at 545 and seeing the ONE other cyclist out at that time and giving a v exuberant wave because like r u retards ytf r u doin this it's a damn blizzard

then i got a diner breakfast and showed physiology who was boss

for my senior thesis I decided to kick the habit and get up every morning at 7 to write for 2, 3 hours. my thesis was probably the worst thing I have ever written in college.

i think i get my lack of a need for sleep from my mom, i always give her shit about getting only 5-6 hours a night, every night, esp lately when she's been at the hosp. for 10-12 hour days. but she's just so used to it by now

I normally need a good 8 hours of sleep a night. I don't even know how I managed to get through some of those nights. OK, that's not true I know exactly how I managed to get through some of them but my methods weren't exactly things I'd recommend to others.

btw i went to my undergrad lib to do some research for a lib science project and got mad nostalgic for finding a bunch of weird books and writing rad history or lit papers

I am totally jealous of people who can function well on less than 6-7 hours of sleep

i also am mad skeptical of energy drinks and don't drink coffee, though this year i've started to drink tea a lot. i don't mix well with caffeine, if i have soda or something too caffeinated after mid-afternoon i can't sleep at night

i think i get my lack of a need for sleep from my mom, i always give her shit about getting only 5-6 hours a night, every night, esp lately when she's been at the hosp. for 10-12 hour days. but she's just so used to it by now

― we be emi robin' (k3vin k.), Sunday, November 29, 2009 7:49 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah my dad pulls 4-5, but i think residency probably destroyed him (this was back when surgical residents were doing 120hr/week easy)

i really can't function on less than 7 (unless i went to bed PHYSICALLY tired and not mentally---i fall asleep instantly and sleep harder or something)

but i actually really like BIG DAY wake-ups for some reason. when i used to ski patrol, i was getting up at 4am after a drunken midnight bedtime and it SUUUUUUCKED but once i was up and in the car w/bros coffee and diner breakfast sandwiches and neil young it became fun. esp since the first thing you did was physical labor in awful weather??? i honestly had some awful mornings but it never seemed like a bad idea in retrospect

feels good to burn that alcohol

breakin some ATP you know what I mean

get up at 730 to get to school/boring job? w/e *snooze* oh shit i'm late

get up at 500 for dawn patrol bro-y stuff after lol college antics? yeah ok but you are driving, dude, i just handed in a paper this morning and there is a sweet party tonight so you know

xp i got you

GBX = http://hollywoodphony.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/ski_patrol.jpg

lol college was kind of rad in that respect

hahahah i have never heard of that

<3 best job ever

i have only heard of "hot dog: the movie"

job = twice weekly volunteer but w/e

also our dogs were fluffy and didn't know how to ski, but that dude is ok too

I always wanted to be a ski instructor but it's been so long that I'm not sure I even know how to ski anymore tbh. That dude is more than OK. He is a bulldog on skis for christ's sake.

if u guys want a dark and dirty look at skiing's underbelly u should watch aspen extreme. rip ($character) ;_;