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Author

An Author is a person that creates a text that is meant to be read and understood by others - usually, a particular audience. They do so to convey a message, or to stimulate or enable them to do particular things. Whitepapers, opinion papers, specifications, standardization texts, advertisements, memo's, mails, etc. could just as well not have been written if they did not have that property.

For us, a high-quality text is a text that not only has a specific audience and serves one or more specific purposes, but also a text that doesn't require its readers to 'hallucinate', i.e. make assumptions so as to understand the intention of its author. Such texts are typically well-suited for specifications, standards, educational materials etc. However, there are also situations in which this kind of quality is not necessary (e.g., in management summaries, or casual notes), or even counter-productive (e.g., in advertisements).

In order to write a high-quality text, its author(s) not only need the appropriate knowledge about the topic of the text; they must have (or create) a conscious understanding of that knowledge that enables them to describe what they mean to say using words and phrases that have a sufficiently well-defined meaning. This is not trivial: often, people that have knowledge about some topic can demonstrate that they do (using the knowledge), while not being capable of expressing the knowledge itself in a fashion that enables readers to learn it.1 Also, it takes discipline to (re)write texts so that in the end, all important terms are used in the way they are defined, and are used consistently and coherently.

  1. For example, people that are native speakers of a language, can usually demonstrate their knowledge of the specifications of that language (its grammar), by showing that they can (1) determine whether or not a sentence in that language is grammatically correct, (2) correct the sentences that were incorrect and (3) come up with (say) 5 alternatives for correcting an incorrect sentence, and picking out 'the most beautiful', or 'the best' one. However, when asked whether they could write down the specifications such that the result is consistent, coherent, complete, cogent, congruent - and other c-words that refer to characteristics that specifications are typically expected to have, they will say 'no'. Even worse: if they are presented a booklet that is about the grammar of their mother's tongue, and are asked to determine whether or not it specifies that grammar in a consistent, coherent, complete, etc. way, they will also decline.↩