In this post at The One Ring, N.E. Brigand said that I commented that I write "papers at about 500 words per hour."
Who, me? Five hundred words per hour? OK, let me clarify ... if I get in a real groove, I can write 500 words of academic prose per hour for about one hour. After that, I tend to fall off a cliff. I can write about 500 words of blog post per hour pretty readily, but that's off-the-cuff kinda stuff.
In the post he's alluding to, I'm talking about writing a presentation to an audience. That, of course, goes faster than writing papers, since oral presentations don't include footnotes or other apparatus, and really dense stuff has to be omitted too.
So, just in case anyone was wondering, writing papers (for publication) comes much slower than blog posts or presentations to students or non-academic audiences. Contrary to the rumourmill, I write papers at the normal human rate. Only when writing blogposts or oral presentations can I sustain the 500 word per hour rate for an extended period.
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ReplyDeleteI consider myself to be pretty speedy when it comes to writing -- blog posts, essays, chapters, whatever -- but that doesn't include the time it takes to go back, rewrite, fix spelling/punctuation errors, expand upon things, and blah blah blah.
In theory, 500 pages an hour could be accurate (for me, it is no where near that lofty a sum), but given the time to re-do things, it's probably more like 670 pages over the course of three or four hours.
For example, it took me thirty seconds to type this comment up, but two minutes to correct things.