Today’s post on context, trust, team size, and test suites took me about three hours to write and revise. At only a 1,030 words (1,134 with the quotes), that is both “relatively quick” and “really quite slow”. Quick in the scheme of many people’s experience of writing, and definitely in terms of “traditional” publishing cycles, but not quick at all in terms of modern blogging. It nets out to 343 words per hour.

The limit is thinking, of course… and revising. (In terms of pure typing speed, I could get 16,000 – 18,000 words on the page in that time span.) I can easily write a thousand words in an hour or less, especially if I am on a roll. The first draft of the post I published earlier probably took me only about 90 minutes. Getting it to a point where I was happy enough with it to publish took me the rest of that time. In that span rewrote many sentences and meaningfully changed every single paragraph, including changing where a few of them lived.

This is the big difference in where I think about where to put things on the site: editing and revision. Notes entries go out with no revision other than a basic check for correct spelling and grammar. Journal entries get at least one and often two or three careful revision pass. I iterate on structure and argument. I might remove whole chunks or relocate them to elsewhere in the item. I definitely work to improve wording. Essays then get perhaps ten times as much attention. They go through many rounds of revision. They might get restructured multiple times, and for that matter I might even outline them.

There are, occasionally, perhaps, gems that just land with little revision. In my experience, though, those are a real rarity. Most even halfway decent writing takes as much or more — usually more, most often much more — time in revision as it does in initial writing.