What our stats tell us about good writers

We’ve been tracking our writers’ and editors’ time for the better part of a decade. We’ve learned a huge amount from that information, including this:

Good writers write efficiently.

Our data show definitively that the writers who produce the best-quality work take less time than writers whose copy isn’t as good. In eight years of gathering this information, we haven’t run across a consistently good, consistently slow writer.

This discovery probably seems backward to a lot of people. (Don’t great writers agonize over every word?) It surprised us at first, too. Here’s the thing: Good writers are fast not because they rush—they don’t—but because they don’t waste time.

In our experience, the best writers start with a sound vision for the piece they’re going to create, and every step of their process advances the copy toward that result. Sometimes at the beginning of a project it’s impossible to know what the final piece should be; in those cases, good writers zero in on the vision quickly as they gather information.

Slower writers tend to think less carefully about where they’re headed. They labor over paragraphs only to delete them later, interview sources they don’t need or ask irrelevant questions, or write a draft that misses the mark and has to be rewritten. The lack of focus wastes time and hurts quality.

If you want to improve your writers’ quality and efficiency, make sure they have a sound vision for their piece and a process focused on realizing it. This is precisely why we front-load our editing: Orienting writers properly from the start results in better content, produced more efficiently.

Please give us a call if you’d like to talk about writing or anything else. We’d love to hear from you.