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>Clark Cone asked:
> I need information about estimating time for the editing portion of a
> technical writing project. There are formulas for calculating the
> number of pages a day for writing, but I haven't been able to find
>anything similar for editing. It would be more helpful yet if the
>information is broken out into the levels of edit.
I work as a Development Editor at Vetnana, a computer book publisher. Last
year, I was asked to develop a metric of how many pages DevEditors could do
in an hour. Development Editing is sometimes called Substantive Editing,
but I don't think this is a fair connection in most publishing worlds.
As a Development Editor I look for organizational issues, at the paragraph
level and the chapter/book level. I look for major stylistic issues (do
not mark them, but if I notice them I point them out to the author). I look
for logical, consistent, and useful thought in their sentences, paragraphs,
chapters and make sure that the target audience can follow along. I work
directly in an MS Word file, using revision marking.
So, for about 4-6 weeks, I literally timed myself on how long it took me to
do various chapters of various books. I kept track of (1) quality of
writing (good/mediocre/bad), how technical the information was
(very/somewhat/not-at-all), and then how many hours it took me to complete
the chapter.
I discovered that I could do approximately 12 pages in an hour, on average.
I got as high as 16 pages an hour and as low as 8 pages an hour. Many
felt that this was very high and too aggressive a metric for our editing,
but during that time I worked on end-user books, advanced programming
books, design books, etc. It has turned out to be a good guage for me
estimating how long it will take me to complete a chapter that comes in.
TTFN,
Michelle Corbin Nichols
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