: Re: How long does it take to write a 1000-word news article? I write tech articles for my blog and for a news outlet here in my country (mostly in French). I've been doing this for years,

@RJPawlick285

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I write news stories about technology. This means that I have to be as quick as I can when reporting news. It's not very easy to keep up with such a pace and over the years I learned some 'tricks' on how to improve my efficiency.

A big part of this process is eliminating the distraction. So, when I sit to write, I close all the unnecessary tabs, especially those of GMail, Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites. I use a simple and minimal online text-editor called Draft to write.

I also found out that, the quicker I finish a piece, the better it is. If It takes me more than 2 - 3 hours to write a 1000-word story, for example, I would know that it will be rubbish. Because I just start to rewrite every phrase three or four times, trying to make it 'perfect'.

So I started setting deadlines (I use this Task Timer for Google Chrome. Not very fancy but it's all I need), which helped improve both my efficiency and the quality of my articles. Thinking fast about the 'what to say' instead of wasting a lot of time on 'how to say it' made my stories better.

Style DOES matter, but I always remind myself that I am not a poet and that the people who are reading my stuff are looking for information not for art. In this case, a good writing style has one mission : keep the readers reading the article and and make simple to understand. As the Facebook motto says : it's better done than perfect.

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