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whatever the statistic turns out to be, it is a fiction.
In 15 years of tech writing, I have written API docs, GUI tool docs, command
line tool docs, marketing collateral, newsletters, a book on CD-I, and even a
cookbook. All considered tech writing, all with different parameters and
audiences and definitely different amounts of time per page. Of course, the
other minor fiction is deciding when a page is finished. Does a finished page
timespan include review time by someone other than a copyeditor ?
Your boss would be better off to ask how long will it take to write a manual on
a specific topic and what do you estimate the page count to be.
"Chalmers, Eric" wrote:
> At some point in my career I ran across a statistic regarding how long it
> actually takes to create on page of technical documentation from scratch.
> At the time, I didn't pay enough attention to the statistic to remember it
> even a few days later. It's now several years later and my boss just asked
> me to find that statistic. She's also interested in the time it takes to
> create one topic of a help system.
>
