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Write for Three Minutes, Then Do It Again

The old way was ninety minutes on one essay, then a lesson spent correcting it. In that same ninety minutes you could write, get feedback and rewrite five times.

April 29, 20264 min read

The old way to study writing was to sit and produce one long piece, forty-five minutes, sometimes an hour and a half. Then you handed it to a teacher, they corrected it, and a whole lesson went on discussing those corrections.

Anyone still working that way is missing a great deal.

The new loop

Step 1. Write a few sentences. If starting feels hard because you are not used to it, set a timer for three minutes. Write as much as you can in those three minutes, with no concern at all for whether the grammar or vocabulary is right.

Step 2. Copy that fast, messy paragraph into an AI assistant and say: give me feedback, but do not rewrite it for me.

Step 3. Read the feedback, and most importantly, make sure you understand it.

Step 4. Go back, stop looking at the screen, and pick only three points from that feedback to act on. Do not take on more. Greed costs you here.

Step 5. Rewrite the paragraph in another three minutes, applying what you just read, from memory.

Repeat that loop three to five times and the paragraph gets genuinely good. Start at three minutes; later you might write for ten.

The crucial part

Write fast and write loosely. The job is to get the ideas out of your head and onto the page, not to labour over every comma.

The time comparison

Old way: ninety minutes to finish one piece.

New way: five minutes writing, five minutes reading feedback, five minutes rewriting, five minutes reading feedback.

By the time the other person has finished their first draft, you have written, been corrected and improved several times over.