How Long Does it Take to Write 1000 Words? [Quick Tips Included] (2024)

Sorry to say, but it kinda depends.

The average time it takes to write 1000 words is 3-4 hours.

But consider these important questions:

What is the piece of writing on? Is it commercial writing? Is it academic writing? Is it a typical blog post? Who is writing it? How are their typing skills? Is it an experienced writer? A beginner?

As you can see, there are many variables.

Don't worry, in this article, we'll go over how long it takes to write 1000 words, tips to help anyone write 1000 words in under an hour, the opportunity costs involved with writing, and more.

If you are counting by page, then you can say that 1000 words are equal to 2 pages single spaced or 4 pages if double spaced.

That is, if you are using a font like Times New Roman with a font of 12pt and 1-inch margins.

If you were to handwrite 1000 words, regardless of your penmanship skills, your writing will be larger and thus probably double the number of pages.

This goes for cursive, calligraphy, cutesy, and chicken scratch.

In most cases, yes!

The average writing speed by hand is around 20 words per minute. And the average for typing is usually double at 40 words per minute.

Following this logic, it should take 25 minutes for the average person to type out 1000 words. And 50 minutes if writing by hand.

This is certainly a stretch but helps illustrate how writing 1000 words in a day is not only possible, it's easier than you might think.

If your goal is to write 1000 words each day, a good general rule of thumb to follow is to you schedule your writing sessions during your most productive hours.

This is different for everyone, but it is important to know what yours are.

Ask yourself:

• Does your brain works best in the morning before other tasks have time to distract you?
• Or is it most creative in the evening when everyone else is asleep?

The other important note is to nail down an ideal writing process that works for you.

If you want to write 1000 words in an hour, especially if you hope to create a quality article from it, you need to follow a system.

By that, I mean your entire writing process needs to be organized.

Let's say your goal is to do some SEO content writing. You could look at Google to reverse engineer your competitors' finished product.

Or you can try this article writing process we use, inspired by the gentlemen at Income School:

Break down your writing into smaller tasks.

Unless you're a topic expert, before you write, you'll need to do some research for content ideas.

1. Choose a topic you want to cover in the article. This will be your primary keyword used in your main title.
2. See what's already ranking for the term to gauge the search intent and your competitiveness to rank.
3. From this starting point, you can then find supporting and highly relevant secondary keywords. These will be your sub-headers to help flesh out your title topic.
4. Once you've done these steps, you'll have a bullet list outline of what you will write about.
5. Think of each sub-header as its own brief article where your goal is to write 2-300 words.
6. Simply make sure you cover the subtopic to the best of your research and abilities and then move on to the next sub-topic on the list.

This helps build momentum with a step-by-step approach.

Pretty soon, you've completed a 1000 word article or longer that covers your topic and the subtopics and that'll help you rank for multiple keywords.

For this method, the really important thing to nail down is the research.

While this may take a bit of extra time in the beginning, it will certainly speed up your actual writing time.

Do the research and planning correctly and you'll be able to write 1000 words in under an hour with your arms tied behind your back.

Besides ear plugs you'll also need a few other tools and tricks to help you work more efficiently. Here are a few that have really helped me over the years.

Frase: If you're writing for SEO or web content, than Frase is a no-brainer. It's an incredibly effective tool for helping to ensure you include all the right terms Google expects from the top ranking pages.

But my personal favorite quality is how it helps you research on a given topic. Unlike competing on-page SEO writing tools, Frase will also scrape questions from Reddit and Quora.

So you'll not only be able to include all the sub-topics of competing pages but also the related questions your target audience are asking on the world's most popular forums.

This will help you gain a better understanding of what to write.

Plus when you optimize the expected words, you'll be able to click on each to get context of how they're used. Letting you do most, if not, all of your research in the same page you write!

I truly can't recommend Frase enough.

I've personally used Frase to create content that attracts over 40,000 organic visitors a month across a just few low DR sites.

It's basically magic.

Earplugs: Put in earplugs to blot out all audible distractions. Headphones with non-verbal music works too of course, but earplugs seem to be especially effective.

Voice to Text: With Google Docs you're also able to talk out what you want written with voice commands. Not only can you write with this, but you can even ask for tables and format them to your preference.

We really are living in the future...

The writing time for a 1,000-word essay varies depending on the type of essay.

You could say that it takes between 30 minutes and 2 hours to write most 1000 word college essays.

Of course, this depends on the subject and essay instructions, plus how much research you've collected, and how important the result is to you.

If you seek quality over quantity, then it could take up to 3-4 hours or more.

Some people take even longer because they choose to proofread their work multiple times before submitting it. No shame in that.

But with each read-through, a writer will probably find minor tweaks and changes they'd like to make.

Academic writing tends to invite fluff in writing. It may well be that you can sum up an idea in a sentence but have to expand it to 1000 words.

Just for a quick aside, I recently finished my master's dissertation essay with a grand total of 21,171 words or 90 pages (including the essay with references).

That took an obscene amount of time writing about research I summed up in a 250 words abstract :D.

A 500 word essay is a page long. This can take you anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour and a half.

This is a style of essay you may remember from high school. It's a perfect length for an introductory paragraph, 1-3 body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

A 250-word essay is half a page single spaced. Depending on the topic, this can take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour to produce a coherent essay.

250 words is very short, so you won't have to fluff it up with too much flowery language.

You'll likely have just enough room to get down to the meat and potatoes of the topic in simple language.

While this is certainly a relief, this can also require choosing your words extra carefully and at times can actually take longer to write than a longer piece.

Professional writers will have a faster typing speed than the average. Plus, they may have the writing experience to hammer out 1000 words with little effort.

A beginner writer may struggle to even know where to start. Especially those wondering how to become a freelance writer with no experience.

While it's certainly possible for anyone to write, there are time costs involved.

For professional writing, 1000 words can mean several hours of focus directed away from other important tasks.

If this is you, you may want to think about outsourcing your copywriting and content needs by working with an agency or hiring a freelance writer.