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If I asked you how many pages you wrote every day, would you know? We calculated how many pages we wrote per week and then divided it across the team. It was less than we had thought. Actually, we felt guilty that we were performing so poorly. It turns out that other Publishing Depts across the company were more or less then same.
How Many Pages Tech Writers Write Depends…
I’ve also seen this question asked on LinkedIn this week. I’m not sure what the background was but you need to be careful who’s asking this question and WHY.
For example, why would HR need to know how many pages you can write.
- Are you getting benchmarked?
- Will this be recorded against future performances?
- Will this impact your annual review?
- What does it say about your colleagues? Is your performance being used to beat them with a stick, so to speak.
How to Calculate Page Count?
To be honest, I think this is a flawed strategy as tech writers do more than write but if you are asked…
- Calculate the number of pages written over 30 day period (min)
- Calculate the number of images and/or multimedia that was created for each doc. For example, Release Notes rarely have screenshots whereas most User Guides will.
- Break out the amount of time for research, setup, review and formatting.
- Add in other variables as you wish to give a more rounded picture.
You can work to a rough ‘guesstimate’ based on this approach.
What am I missing? And what would be your reaction if you were asked this question?
PS – How many pages do you think we wrote?
