3 mar 2009

I recommend writing every day, as you know, if you are engaged in a long-term major project. You can conceptualize this either as time or as a certain amount of work accomplished. Since microsoft word keeps a running word count, you can watch a project grow.

So how much should you write a day? 100 words is three to six sentences or a short paragraph. 1,000 words is three to four pages. A full length article is 5,000-6,000. A book will be in the mid to high five figures. Most days you are doing to want to write more or less 400-600 words. That is, you want to increase the overall word count by that many words, even if some of those words are very rough notes. That's ten to twelve days to write the article, with another couple of days to revise for style and check the bibliography.

So how come it takes me sometimes 6 months to write an article? There's no way I'm working on a twenty-page article everyday for six months and it taking me that long to finish it. It must be because I am working on it two or three times a month, or even taking whole months off from it.

I realize other people don't have my facility with writing, so "results might vary." On the other hand, writing every day is a way of developing that facility in the first place.

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