How to Write Faster: Use Your Voice
(150 WPM vs 40 WPM Typing)

The 40 WPM vs 150 WPM math, explained

Typing speed has been measured for decades, and the consensus numbers are remarkably stable. The average adult types at about 40 words per minute on a standard QWERTY keyboard. A trained professional typist sits around 65 to 75. A very fast typist hits 100. The world record on Monkeytype is over 300, but that is a one-minute sprint, not sustainable output. Sustained writing speed for almost everyone is far below the burst speed they could hit on a typing test.

Speech rates have been measured almost as long. Average conversational English sits around 150 words per minute. Newscasters speak at about 140 to 160 because that is the rate that feels natural to listen to. Auctioneers reach 250 to 350 for brief bursts. Comfortable spontaneous speech for almost any adult sits in the 120 to 180 range. That is two to four times your sustained typing speed.

If you take your typical 90-minute writing session and replace the first-draft typing with dictation, you do not get a 1.5x improvement, you get something closer to 3x. A 1,500-word draft that took 90 minutes to type takes 30 to 40 minutes to dictate. Add 15 to 20 minutes of editing afterward. Total time: about 50 minutes for the same output, with hands that hurt less and a brain that is less drained from staring at a screen.

Famous writers who dictated

The "real writers type their own sentences" myth is recent and false. Some of the most productive writers in history outsourced the physical writing step entirely, either to a secretary or to a recording device.

Eugene Schwartz

Schwartz is one of the most-cited direct-response copywriters in marketing history. His book Breakthrough Advertising is still considered the canonical text on long-form sales copy. His working method was famously fast and famously dictation-heavy. He used a kitchen timer set to short bursts, dictated copy aloud, and considered the typing-it-up step a separate, slower task. His sales letters generated tens of millions in revenue for clients in the 1960s and 1970s.

Isaac Asimov

Asimov published over 500 books across science fiction, popular science, and non-fiction. He was famously prolific and openly described the working method behind it. Early in his career he typed everything himself. Later, as the output volume grew, he dictated significant portions to a secretary or directly into a recorder. His point in interviews was always that the bottleneck is composition, not finger speed, and that a writer who insists on typing their own first drafts is choosing a slower workflow for aesthetic reasons rather than practical ones.

Winston Churchill, Barbara Cartland, Henry James

Churchill dictated almost all of his major political writing and history books to secretaries. Barbara Cartland wrote over 700 romance novels, almost all of them dictated. Henry James dictated his late-period novels to a typist after handwriting started giving him cramps. The list goes on. The pattern is that high-output writers eventually find that the keyboard, or the pen, is the slowest part of their pipeline and they move past it.

The dictate-then-edit workflow, in detail

The mistake most first-time dictation users make is trying to dictate a finished sentence. That is not what dictation is for. Dictation is for getting a rough first draft out of your head and onto the page at conversational speed. Editing is still a typing task, because editing rewards precision and small movements and that is what keyboards are good at.

Step 1: Outline by typing or by hand

Spend 5 minutes typing a bullet outline of what you want to say. This is the part of writing where you actually think hardest. Voice does not help here because the limiting factor is your structure, not your finger speed.

Step 2: Dictate each section as a continuous burst

Open the target app. Place your cursor where the section starts. Hold the StarWhisper hotkey. Speak the section out loud, end to end, without trying to polish. Release the hotkey. The text appears. If you mess up mid-sentence, just say "no, scratch that" or restart the sentence; you will clean it up in the edit pass. Move to the next section.

Step 3: Take a five-minute break

Walk away from the screen. The break matters because editing is much faster when you are not still mentally inside the draft.

Step 4: Edit by typing

Come back. Read through the rough dictated draft. Cut the false starts. Tighten the prose. Restructure the bits that came out backwards. This is where keyboards are actually fast, because edits are small targeted movements, not sustained throughput.

Net result for a 1,500-word piece: 5 minutes outline, 12 minutes dictation, 5 minutes break, 25 minutes editing. Total 47 minutes for a draft that would have taken 90 to 120 minutes of pure typing.

What you can dictate, ranked by speed gain

Not all writing benefits equally from voice. Here is the rough hierarchy.

Where dictation does not help (the honest section)

Specific cases where voice is not the answer

• Writing code in your IDE. Function names, brackets, and indentation are awkward to speak. Dictate comments and commit messages, type the code.
• Editing existing prose. You will be moving your cursor and making one-word changes. Type these. Voice shines on continuous output, not surgical edits.
• Formatting-heavy documents with lots of nested bullets, table cells, or styled blocks. The format is faster to apply by keyboard.
• Quiet environments where you cannot speak (library, open-plan office, late at night with sleeping family). This is the most common real-world blocker.
• Legal contracts and citations where exact punctuation matters and a misheard comma changes meaning.

For everything else, which is the bulk of what most writers, copywriters, students, and knowledge workers actually produce, voice wins on time.

How to actually set this up in 5 minutes

Total time to first dictated paragraph: about 5 minutes.

1. Download StarWhisper from the website or the Microsoft Store. The installer is small. On first run, the app downloads the Whisper model in the background.
2. Pick a model. Medium is a good baseline for most PCs. Large is more accurate but heavier. Small is faster on older hardware.
3. Set your push-to-talk hotkey. Many writers use a side mouse button or a Caps Lock remap. Pick whatever your hand can hit without thinking.
4. Open your usual writing app. Word, Notion, Google Docs, Substack, your email, your project tool, anything.
5. Place your cursor where the text should go. Hold the hotkey. Speak a paragraph. Release. The text appears.
6. Try a few apps to confirm it works everywhere you write. It does, because the Windows IME mechanism is application-agnostic.
7. For deeper guides, see how to use voice in Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Notion, and ChatGPT.

Who this page is for

If you searched "how to write faster" or "write faster software," you probably fit into one of these patterns.

• You are a novelist, blogger, or substack writer trying to hit a daily word count and your fingers are the bottleneck.
• You are a copywriter who heard Eugene Schwartz dictated everything and wants to see if it actually helps.
• You are a student facing essay deadlines and want to draft 3x faster.
• You spend half your day in email and Slack and you want to stop typing the same kind of message over and over.
• Your hands hurt and you need a new input method for the long term.
• You are looking for the fastest way to take meeting notes while staying focused on the meeting.

In every one of those cases, voice for first drafts is a near-zero-risk experiment. The download is free, the trial is a single 5-minute install, and the speed difference is large enough that you will know inside one session whether it works for you.

The honest verdict

If you want to write faster and you only do one thing, switch to voice for first drafts. The math is too lopsided to argue with. 40 WPM typing versus 150 WPM speaking is a 3.75x raw output difference, and even after editing time the net stays well above pure typing. Famous high-output writers across every era figured this out and worked around the keyboard. Modern speech engines like Whisper made the same workflow available to everyone without a personal secretary.

StarWhisper is free for personal use, $10 per month for unlimited Pro, runs locally on Windows 10 and 11, and works in every app you already write in. It is the cheapest possible test of whether voice writing fits your brain. Most writers who try it for a week stop typing first drafts entirely.