paying by the word

[Ned Bedinger]

Jessica Weissman wrote:
> Pay by the word may not be used so much these days, but at one time some
> US government agencies measured tech writer productivity by word count.
> My uncle, who was a project manager for Defense Department development
> projects, tells stories of editing writing for clarity only to have the
> writer object because the word count was being lowered too much.
>
> Unfortunately my uncle could not change the productivity measure in use.
>
> Too bad there isn't something analogous to function points for measuring
> tech writer productivity.
>   
What's a function point?