How To Improve The Quality Of Your Writing

Want to Improve the Quality of Your Writing? Type Slower

There's no rush, folks!

Peter Dockrill | January 22, 2016

Let's face it, not everybody's equally gifted when it comes to getting their thoughts down on paper (or the digital equivalent). But according to a new study, there's an easy trick anybody can do to improve the quality of their writing: just type more slowly.
Researchers in Canada have found that when people are forced to write at a slower speed, it can actually enhance their way with words, with the use of word choice in particular benefiting from a calmer pace.

"This is the first study to show that when you interfere with people's typing, their writing can get better," said Professor Evan F. Risko, Canada Research Chair in Embodied and Embedded Cognition and senior author of the study. "We're not saying that students should write their term papers with one hand, but our results show that going fast can have its drawbacks. This is important to consider as writing tools continue to emerge that let us get our thoughts onto the proverbial page faster and faster."

<more at http://www.sciencealert.com/want-to-improve-the-quality-of-your-writing-type-slower; related links: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-01/uow-sdy012116.php (Slow down your typing to improve your writing: Study. January 21, 2016) and http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjop.12177/abstract (Effects of disfluency in writing. Srdan Medimorec and Evan F. Risko. British Journal of Psychology. DOI: 10.1111/bjop.12177. [Abstract: While much previous research has suggested that decreased transcription fluency has a detrimental effect on writing, there is recent evidence that decreased fluency can actually benefit cognitive processing. Across a series of experiments, we manipulated transcription fluency of ostensibly skilled typewriters by asking them to type essays in two conditions: both-handed and one-handed typewriting. We used the Coh-Metrix text analyser to investigate the effects of decreased transcription fluency on various aspects of essay writing, such as lexical sophistication, sentence complexity, and cohesion of essays (important indicators of successful writing). We demonstrate that decreased fluency can benefit certain aspects of writing and discuss potential mechanisms underlying disfluency effects in essay writing.])>