Writing Assignment: Write With A 30-Minute Deadline

by Randy Murray on June 27, 2014

“Hey you. Yeah you. I need 200 words on this Chinese fossil egg thing on my desk in 30 minutes.”

Ah, the life of the cub reporter. No fussing about what to write. You never have to worry about that. Someone will tell you exactly what they want and when they want it. The when is usually a ridiculously short time. No time for sublime, carefully crafted prose. But you do need clean, clear, descriptive writing.

Can’t be done? It’s done all day long. And you can do it too. You just have to put yourself in the mindset of accepting assignments and not arguing. There’s no time for that. Just write. Write about subject X and get it done by time Y. Y being no longer than one hour.

You can do it. And if you’re game, you can do it several times in a single day.

For today’s assignment  I need 200 words on this Chinese fossil egg thing on my desk in 30 minutes.

You can repeat this exercise with any topic, typically a fresh news story. For bonus points, submit your finished story in the comments here.

Writing Assignment: Write With A 30-Minute Deadline by Randy Murray, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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