Certain tech writers (e.g., me) work in an environment where documents, once published, are not static. They can be changed, through a process, to be whatever is required. Basically, my documents fall into 2 main categories.
- More rarely: I am asked to generate a document from scratch, sometimes with a previous example, sometimes not. I pass revisions back and forth with others and eventually we hammer out the final version. This kind of document I have no problem claiming authorship over.
4 comments:
Dan, unfortunately I can't answer your question, but I do find a point that you made really interesting.
You say that "documents, once published, are not static." This aspect of publication today really highlights the fact that "publication" is an event not a product. This has always been the case (think of authors revising their novels and publishing new versions of them [to later confuse students and engage scholars, I am sure]), but today's accelerated publication process really brings this to light.
This event-not-product distinction also ties in with copyright issues. For example, a student publishes a poem on a website, then tries to publish it in a prestigious journal. Many literary journals will not print that poem because of "previous publication." Often this is because of copyright concerns (does the writer own the copyright to his or her work after it's been published?) and also with originality (what journal would want to publish something that has already been available to readers, even if it has been has removed from the website?).
Lessig's blog post (1/15/08) regarding Obama's 2002 speech really shows how "old" internet-published material can be resurrected, even if the original has been moved or deleted. Good stuff to remember when internet publishing!
Dan, I'm sympathetic to your confusion, as I often feel it myself, though I don't think that in scenario #1 the "higher ups" consider you the author of the document. Isn't it more of a stamp of approval, along the lines of "now it says what we want it to say," right? I mean, I think that's what you're being paid to do, at least from a management perspective.
However, if they really consider that document to be authored by you, then that's kinda creepy if you think about it too closely.
Anyway, you've raised an interesting issue of the relationship between authorship and institutions, a relationship that is often deliberately blurred, buried deep in third-person legalese, "mistakes were made," etc. At my work, for example, it is our practice to replace (aka bury) authorship under our institutional logo, often without the author's consent or awareness. On some of our Adobe pdf's, under document properties, we deliberately replace the author's name with our institution, so it appears that, say, NIU authored a policy manual. How absurd! Since when does brick-and-mortar learn to type?
Your second scenario reminds me of the slippery slope between authorship and collaboration; at what point does the author become a collaborator, and vice versa? Surely it's not set in stone somewhere yet we often speak as if we're certain when someone is a collaborator and when they are an author of a document. It just goes to show you that the everyday exercise of writing is fraught with complications when you stop to think about it.
Dan -- I've found myself in similar situations (way back in a previous professional life), and I guess I dealt with my discomfort (particularly in the case of your first scenario) by assuming a kind of corporate authorship. Aren't the users of these documents aware, on some level, of the way they're created? Since both the documents and the ideas contained in them are, conventionally anyway, the property of the company, does it ultimately matter whose name is attached to it?
I sympathize with Dan's position. As a collaborative writer (a grant writer who works with faculty, deans, and others to create programs and convince others to fund them), I know that the ideas within the proposals I create are not all my own. However, I also know that the written document was produced by me. Isn't there any "respect" (for lack of a better word) left for the craft of the writer? In my professional experience, authorship seems to have become an umbrella term to include everyone who has contributed an idea to something that is written. But in my mind (bitter as it may be), this has contributed to the lack of appreciation for specialized writing skills.
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