TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Erika Yanovich For the purpose of quantifying one's work, how many Word
2000 characters (with spaces) is equal to 1 page in your opinion?>>
There is no universal standard, though you'll often see quoted figures
that hover around 250 words per double-spaced manuscript page, with a
word defined as an average of 5 characters followed by a space or
punctuation. That would come to ca. 1500 characters per page. In my
editing practice, I've frequently worked at a fixed price per 250-word
page, but that's just me. Tweak those assumptions however you like:
12-character words plus two spaces if you're writing for lawyers, for
example. <g>
The quickest and most useful way to obtain a customized estimate that
reflects the work you're actually doing is to use your software's word
count feature. For example, in Word, switch to layout view, select two
pages of text, and with that text still highlighted, use the word count
feature (under the Tools menu). That tells you the actual number of
words or characters per page for your specific writing context. For
more reliable averages, choose several documents and multiple pages per
document.
But any such number is meaningless if it doesn't relate to the reason
why you want to quantify your work. (Word counts are as useless as
readability indices in that sense.*) If the goal is (for example) to
predict how long it will take to complete a documentation set, word or
character counts are essentially useless. It's more important to
estimate how many concepts (e.g., menu choices, fields, checkboxes) you
can fit into a page or create in an hour.
* I've seen a few well-designed studies, including one a couple years
back in Technical Communication, that conclusively demonstrated no
causal or other correlation between a readability index and the ability
of the subjects to read and understand the text. If you doubt me, try
this test: Take any sentence, and randomize the word order so that the
sentence is completely incomprehensible, or better still, says the
opposite of the original. You'll get an identical readability index for
both sentences. Case closed.
So let's toss the ball back into your hands: what do you hope to
accomplish by quantifying your work? Tell us that, and we can provide
more useful guidance.
--Geoff Hart ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)
ROBOHELP X5: Featuring Word 2003 support, Content Management, Multi-Author
support, PDF and XML support and much more!
TRY IT TODAY at http://www.macromedia.com/go/techwrl
WEBWORKS FINALDRAFT: New! Document review system for Word and FrameMaker
authors. Automatic browser-based drafts with unlimited reviewers. Full
online discussions -- no Web server needed! http://www.webworks.com/techwr-l
---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as:
archiver -at- techwr-l -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot- Visit http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.
