Skip to content

Write in phases, not in one shot

Ask for an article and you get an article. Ask for an outline first and you get a better article, for less total work.

6 min read

Level 0

Curious

0 XP
150 XP to ApprenticeNo streak yet0 badges0% done

The single biggest quality lever after research is refusing to let it write the whole thing at once.

One giant generation means every structural decision gets made silently, while it is busy writing prose. You find out what it decided by reading two thousand words.

The phases

write-non-listicle
Research: SERP, scrape 10, log sources
Outline each source separately
Merge into one outline, kill the overlap
Outline QA: does every section have a job?
Key takeaways, intro, outro
Map where the product may appearin progress
Outline QA round 2, after product placement
Size every section (words per H2)
Write section by section
Nine phases, and writing is the last one. Eight of them are decisions made while they are still cheap to change.

The two outline QA rounds are the part people skip and the part that pays. Round one asks whether every section has a job. Round two runs after you decide where the product appears, because that decision usually breaks a section that was fine before.

Size the sections before writing them

Give each H2 a word budget. Without one, the first three sections get 600 words each and the last four get 150, because it front-loads effort exactly like a tired human does.

The cheapest quality win in this whole course

Ask for the outline only, read it, fix it, then ask for the draft. Two minutes of reading an outline saves an hour of rewriting prose, and it is the one habit that survives no matter what tooling you use.

Do this now

  1. 1

    Ask for an outline and stop it there.

    > Outline this article only. Every H2 with one line on what it
    > owes the reader, and a word budget. Do not write any prose yet.
  2. 2

    Read it and cut anything you cannot justify.

    If you cannot say what a section is for in one line, the reader will not work it out from a thousand words either.

  3. 3

    Then release it, section by section.

    > Write section 1 only, to its budget. Stop after it.

    Section by section means you catch a voice problem in paragraph two instead of paragraph forty.

Finished reading?

Mark it done to bank the XP and keep your streak alive. Any challenges on this page score separately, so you can come back for a perfect run later.