On Writing Fast Without Compromising Quality

During my application for the company I worked on during my internship, I was asked to write on-the-spot about five random topics. It was a hundred words each, if I remember correctly. It's really a lot like extemporaneous speech. And because I am fairly comfortable with public speaking and expressing my opinions, I realized that the quality of my written work will depend on how effective I am able to translate the public speaker in my head into these black characters on white space that you are reading right now.

I do imagine myself talking when I write. I imagine my audience and how I need to effectively persuade them. I am very extra-sensitive about pauses and changes in tone of the speaker in my head and how I translate it into writing with use of punctuations. I must not limit myself, in fact, I must separate myself from the constraints of the S-TV-DO or whatever generic pattern of "correct grammar" contemporary schooling had prescribed me to follow. Run-on sentences, comma splices, and other forms of unconventional patterns of speech—these are all necessary to create dramatic and effective rhetoric.

But also, I am reminded of the part that it was only a hundred words each. The challenge is always to be able to say in ten words effectively what others will need a hundred or more words to express (this is a paraphrase of a quotation but I can't find in Google who said it). It must be dramatic but not too long or draggy; engaging and straight-to-the-point at the same time.

In the world of SEO or search engine optimization, writing fast is important. I remember being trained to write 300 words in 15 mins for a random topic, again if I remember correctly, with the end goal of being able to write 15 different articles for the same topic in the shortest amount of time. It is monotonous and mind-numbing but will surely be helpful in generating content for niche sites, backlinks, and other techniques used in SEO.

But it is important to make sure that quality is not compromised. Though I said to never be constrained by prescribed grammar, keep in mind that spelling and grammar is something that Google checks and plays a role in ranking the content of websites.

Plus, it is a rule of thumb to always focus on quality because if you are able to penetrate the search engines with low quality content, your traffic in the long run will go down and you might lose the patronage of your readership—no one likes spam. Moreover, Google gets better every day most especially with distinguishing quality of content.

Gaining a readership through quality content and having your links shared through social media sites naturally is still the best because regardless of ranking, you will have loyal readers who trust your content. Of course, both ranking and high quality content is desired. You also wouldn't want to have the highest quality content and the most relevant and yet not have search engine visibility.

Anyway, I have some reading materials I have to force into my brain and some stuff to write and a lot of new downloads I have to watch. Be sure to follow me on Twitter to be updated on my latest blog posts.