This article reports on a study which examined the effectiveness of a 7-minute writing technique whereby students regularly wrote as much as they could in 7 minutes three times a week for a period of 10 weeks. The study was conducted with four classes of first-year and third-year students at a university in Vietnam. The study looked at the fluency, complexity, and accuracy of the students' writing in English. By the end of the programme, the third-year students in the experimental group produced significantly longer pieces of writing and achieved significantly higher scores for the overall quality of their writing than the control group. The first-year experimental group performed slightly better than the control group on most measures, but the differences were not statistically significant. Almost no improvement in writing complexity was found among the four classes across the two cohorts, and students did not increase the accuracy of their writing in English. However, the 7-minute writing practice clearly helped the students write fluently.