Re: time per page

Subject: Re: time per page
From: Robert Plamondon <robert -at- PLAMONDON -dot- COM>
Date: Sun, 11 Jun 1995 09:26:20 PDT

Timothy Schablin writes:

>Just out of curiousity, how many pages of a tech manual can you produce
>in one day (8 hours). I'm doing about 3. Is that average?

For what? When I "produce" (that is, format) a manual with no diagrams,
I can often reach 50 pages per day. I can generally edit 25 pages per
day. I can write from zero to ten pages per day. These are formatted,
8.5x11" pages in 1-3 columns and 10-11 point type. Technical illustrations
can take me from ten minutes to a week to create.

Writing, in particular, depends on the nastiness of the subject matter.
I can whip out simple narrative copy at extreme speed, but register
bit-field definitions, based on an incoherent, incomplete, error-riddled
spec, is more an exercise in reverse-engineering than writing or editing.

I've heard people claim that Silicon Valley hardware technical writing
has a target of one page of writing per day, or 25 pages of editing.
Given the horrendously bad source materials, the writing rate varies
little if the document is a reworked engineering specification or rewritten
completely from scratch.

Marketing and promotional material is generally slower to write, since
style and nuance count for a lot, and the space is generally very limited.


-- Robert


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