Learning How to Write Better by not Writing at All

For many years, I worked on developing a skill that became quite lucrative in terms of producing written content for other people and clients. That said there’s only so much one can do in a given day. No matter how fast you write, there’s a limit to what you can produce, and eventually I hit that fence.
So, I played around with some ideas of how to increase my content production speed. I did the typical things with regards to could I increase my typing speed? Could I hire help and manage their work, and then focus on editing while they’re writing, and my output would increase overall with more hands? I tried predictive writing tools as well, but I never really got a substantial leap forward beyond my limit of what I could produce in a day. And, that limited by income ability.
Old is Cool Again

Then I rediscovered an old tool. It’s been around for decades, used by doctors, lawyers and anyone who needed to produce written content in large amounts. That tool is dictation. The fact of the matter is, the brain produces and performs at a speed that is 100 times, even maybe 1000 times faster, than a professional person can write. There are a few that can keep up, and they are professional dictation writers, no surprise. However, for the most part, of the brain just outpaces most everything. When we get to the day that the brain can literally just translate directly to a computer, we will probably leap forward even further.
Putting Idea to Practice

In the meantime, however, dictation has been my lifesaver, being able to produce content in the neighborhood of 500 to 1000 words literally in a handful of minutes as opposed to what it would’ve taken me in terms of 30 to 45 minutes, even an hour. I still have to go through and edit the material, capital letters here, commas there, semicolons here, etc., but the speed at which I’m writing is again 5 to 10 times faster than anything I produced before and also allows me to generate anywhere from 5 to 10 articles in an hour versus the one to two that I was doing previously. It’s just an amazingly forward jump as a writer once you learn how to do it.
Technology Makes Dictation Easier Now
Now the problem that most people had with dictation was that it was traditionally done with a little handheld recorder, tape or digital, but then you still had to transcribe it. Somehow, you had to get what was recorded from voice to text. Welcome the mobile phone. Unlike the previous dictation recorders, which still involved a two-step process or having to get somebody to transcribe your stuff that was recorded, your phone does it for you. If you have an iPhone or Android or similar, and it has a dictation feature, you can literally speak to the phone. The quality of the transcription is pretty damn good. It will screw up words where you don’t speak clearly, if you speak too fast or the word is not in the phone's dictionary, but overall the content production and at least the quality of transcription is more than acceptable. I would give it a B+.
Proof in the Pudding
So, this article that you’re reading right now is a product of dictation. It took me probably five minutes to crank it out, and it will probably take me another 5 to 10 minutes to edit it. Overall, going slowly, it amounts to 20 minutes worth of effort. In the meantime, I’ve got another 40 minutes in the hour to do something else.