“How long?” It’s a question I have heard almost every day for the last 20 years. Before that, it was one of my own favourite questions. In any business, concern over the time required to deliver a job is natural, and entirely reasonable. After all, time is money. It should be one of the first lessons a medical writer learns, and often the first question they ask when being briefed on a new assignment.
For the new medical writer, the question is often driven by uncertainty. The answer may determine how many lunch breaks they sacrifice over the next week in an effort to appear efficient. For the experienced writer, it shapes the strategy they will adopt. They know where time can be saved and where shortcuts are dangerous.
But it is not just economics that drives our desire to write quickly. Efficiency is part of our professional identity. Spending too long on a project can drain motivation, reduce momentum, and ultimately diminish the quality of thought that underpins the writing process.
Wanting to write quickly and efficiently makes business sense, but quality writing takes time. There is no escaping that reality. A high‑quality manuscript, abstract, or scientific blog cannot be reliably produced in 30 minutes. Or at least, not by most of us. Rushing a job increases the likelihood of errors, omissions, and superficial analysis. If you are writing about new research, for example, you may spend 30 minutes simply locating and understanding the relevant material before a single sentence is drafted.
Yet we work in commercial environments. We do not have the luxury of endless time. So, how much time do you really need?
Why writing takes longer than we think
Sadly, there is no straightforward answer. Writing time depends on multiple interacting factors: the complexity of the subject, familiarity with the topic, availability of resources, required depth of analysis, and the intended audience.
What we do know is that reading, speaking, and typing each operate at different speeds. Adult silent reading speeds are often cited in the range of 200–400 words per minute, depending on difficulty and comprehension level [1]. Speaking rates for presentations typically fall between 140 and 160 words per minute [2]. By contrast, average keyboarding speed is commonly around 40 words per minute for general users, with trained professionals often reaching 65–75 words per minute [3].
These figures, however, only describe mechanical throughput. They do not account for the most important component of writing: thinking.
Cognitive models of writing consistently show that expert writers spend substantial time on conceptual planning, problem‑solving, and revision rather than continuous text production [4]. In that sense, the title ‘medical writer’ can feel like a misnomer. More time is often spent thinking than writing, or, at the very least, more time is spent thinking while writing than simply typing words onto a page.
If your work requires analysis, interpretation, or originality, the pace slows further. Stephen King famously advised that a first draft should not take longer than a season. For a 120,000‑word novel over 3 months, that equates to approximately 1,300–1,500 words per day. Spread across a working day, that is only a few carefully considered words per minute. From this perspective, drafting the introduction of a scientific manuscript, typically 750 to 1,200 words, within a day becomes entirely plausible, provided the writer is not constantly interrupted by extensive source checking or unfamiliar material.
Familiarity, research effort, and the illusion of ease
Topic familiarity changes everything. Some subjects are richly documented and easily researched; others are niche (pun), technical, or poorly indexed. The easier it is to find reliable information, the faster you can write. If you are producing an opinion piece on a topic you already know well, the process may involve little formal research at all, only the challenge of organising existing thoughts into a coherent structure.
That sounds easy. It rarely is.
I find it particularly difficult to write about diabetes, not because I don’t know enough but because I know too much and worry so much about nuance It is also a difficult therapy area because these has been so much research published. In the end, there is little value in comparing your writing speed to someone else’s. Every writer arrives with a unique combination of experience, knowledge, habits, and confidence. There is no universal benchmark.
What must be considered when estimating timelines
There are, however, practical considerations that should always be discussed when estimating timelines. These include:
- Researching
- Drafting
- Editing and proofreading
- Referencing
- Fact‑checking
And, importantly, project management: emails, calls, meetings, and revisions. Underestimating these hidden tasks is one of the most common causes of missed deadlines. You can help yourself by adopting practices that improve efficiency without sacrificing quality. These include:
- Establishing a structured work–reward routine
- Identifying and reducing distractions
- Understanding document structure before drafting
- Researching efficiently by building a library of trusted resources and examples
For tracking your own productivity, tools such as Ronin and TimeSheet Xpress remain valuable options for recording task duration and building a realistic dataset for future planning.
If a particular form of writing is new to you, expect it to take at least twice as long. Learning proper structure and process requires deliberate effort. Research on expertise consistently shows that skill development depends on sustained, focused practice rather than repetition alone [5][6].
Speed comes later.
Why writing faster helps
There are very few genuine shortcuts in writing. More often than not, what slows us down is not lack of ability but lack of confidence. Early in your career, it may take hours to produce a small amount of polished text, and that is entirely acceptable, provided your manager’s expectations are aligned. Like any skill, writing improves with time and training. The process becomes more intuitive. Decisions become faster. Patterns emerge.
If you want to overcome writer’s block, write faster. If you want to finish a long‑standing project, write faster. If you want to become more professional, write faster. Not because fast writing is always good writing, but because it gets you to the real work: revision.
Revision is where quality is forged. Writing the first draft should be exploratory and energetic. Editing is where discipline takes over. One is improvisational jazz; the other is orchestral refinement.
Experience, data, and the reality of deadlines
You will refine your average writing time only through experience. No one can tell you exactly how long it should take to write 1,000 words. Not without understanding the project itself.
There is no substitute for experience, and that leads to one final suggestion: keep accurate records of the time you spend on every assignment. Over time, those records become your most valuable negotiating tool when setting future timelines.
And finally, a note to those setting deadlines: if timelines are too strict, you may be defining the quality of the work you receive in return.
References
- Rayner K, Schotter ER, Masson MEJ, Potter MC, Treiman R. So much to read, so little time: How do we read, and can speed reading help? Psychol Sci Public Interest. 2016;17(1):4–34.
- Tauroza S, Allison D. Speech rates in British English. Appl Linguist. 1990;11(1):90–105.
- Dhakal V, Feit AM, Kristensson PO, Oulasvirta A. Observations on typing from 136 million keystrokes. CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2018.
- Hayes JR. A new framework for understanding cognition and affect in writing. In: Beard R, Myhill D, Riley J, Nystrand M, editors. The SAGE Handbook of Writing Development. London: SAGE; 2009.
- Ericsson KA, Krampe RT, Tesch‑Römer C. The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychol Rev. 1993;100(3):363–406.
- Kellogg RT. Training writing skills: A cognitive developmental perspective. J Writing Res. 2008;1(1):1–26.
