Like most writers, I procrastinate like mad. When I’ve finished my research and time comes to start writing, I’ll poke around in a zillion other tasks — rearranging my desk, tackling old email, going…

• I begin each paragraph with a hyphen.
• I lower-case the first letter of every sentence.
• I don’t put a period at the end of a sentence. (A question mark or exclamation point is fine.) Instead, I end each sentence using two forward-slashes, like this //

I leave it in that odd format right up until the day before I’m filing a big magazine feature. Then, on the last day, I slowly go through the whole piece, transforming each sentence into the correct format.
This frees me up, on this final day, to become an obsessive about word choice on a sentence-by-sentence level.