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A great tool if you’re writing on a deadline

All righty then. Just fin­ished up a cool con­ver­sa­tion with a dude that I have to meet with later to fig­ure out some stuff. Now, I guess I’ll keep plug­ging away at writ­ing, nay, test­ing Write or Die, a tim­ing and word­count inter­face that helps focus your writ­ing by impos­ing lim­it­a­tions and con­sequences on your writing.…

All righty then. Just fin­ished up a cool con­ver­sa­tion with a dude that I have to meet with later to fig­ure out some stuff.

Now, I guess I’ll keep plug­ging away at writ­ing, nay, test­ing Write or Die, a tim­ing and word­count inter­face that helps focus your writ­ing by impos­ing lim­it­a­tions and con­sequences on your writing.

I’ve not bumped into the con­sequences yet, but I have bumped into the limitations.

- it’s hard to spellcheck.
— no oth­er format­ting com­mands, it’s all about get­ting the words out of your head and on the screen
— Oh, hey, the screen turned red when I paused for thought. Cool.. Just to let me know that I should­n’t do that, I guess.

Now then, this test is only a 200 word­count test, and I set a time lim­it of 10 minutes to write it.

At this point, includ­ing the 3 minutes of con­ver­sa­tion that occured after I launched the app, but before I star­ted actu­al writ­ing, I’m at 159 words and about 4 minutes remain­ing. I should be able to make the deadline…maybe.

Wow, one thing I do notice; all this con­cen­trated writ­ing is caus­ing me to notice my wrists. Usu­ally my writ­ing style is more thought­ful and cas­u­al, but right now I’m just spewing…oh, hey, I just made 200 words, with about 3 minutes to spare.

Well, I won’t edit this too much; I’ll just paste it in as is, and let it be an example of work cre­ated with Write or Die.

After writ­ing using this tool, here’re some thoughts:
— Yes, I’d use it again
— My wrist is kinda sore right now
— It could use some addi­tion­al edit­ing / lay­out features
— Any­thing writ­ten using Write or Die *must* be edited…typing spew is not good reading

26 seconds left — copy to clip­board just in case 🙂 Sav­ing now.

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Comments

4 responses to “A great tool if you’re writing on a deadline”

  1. Ben Babcock Avatar
    Ben Babcock

    I’ve recom­men­ded Write or Die to some friends, although I don’t use it myself.

    Spell-check and, for the most part, lay­out, are incid­ent­al to com­pos­i­tion and can be left for when you take what you’ve writ­ten and past it into your word pro­cessor for revision.

    Also, what self-respect­ing browser does­n’t have a spell-check these days? I just tried, and Fire­fox’s spell check works fine with Write or Die.

    Reply
  2. Brad Grier Avatar
    Brad Grier

    Thanks Ben,

    And yep, post-pro­cessing is a must for Write or Die. I really like the way it forces you to spew everything out, stream of con­scious­ness writ­ing if you will. Edit­ing, format­ting, lay­out, all that can fol­low after you’ve got the meat of your con­tent created.

    Oh, I’d not thought to try Fire­fox’s spellcheck whilst writ­ing. Good thought!

    Reply
  3. Christine Avatar
    Christine

    This looks a great way to get some writ­ing done. I have to try it! I actu­ally read your tweet of this post and favor­ited it to read later, so glad I did!

    Reply
  4. Brad Grier Avatar
    Brad Grier

    Hi Christine, yes, it’s a great way to get words out of your head and on the screen. I find myself using it to just get stuff out, then, go back and pol­ish. It does seem to be speed­ing up the pro­cess, but I’m not com­fort­able with this style of writ­ing yet. I do like to pause for thought, regroup and then con­tin­ue — Write or Die pen­al­izes you for that, though you can turn those set­tings off.

    Either way, I’m still going to keep test­ing it. Thanks for fol­low­ing up on the Tweet! Nice to know those are being read too 😉

    Reply

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