It's weird, but for me the term author is just really closely tied to writing, even though I know that it could be applied to a wider range of activities. And perhaps it should be.
For me it seems like the terms fall into categories (which to be honest probably reflect traditional divisions in the academy)
Writer (text/prose on page) = Author (most strong in connection with a published book)
Writer (text/poetry) =Poet (secondarily thought of as author, but generally only when tied to a book)
Writer (movies, TV, theatre) = screen writer or playwright for theatre Writer (lyrics) = song writer (only a tenuous link to author)
Writer (musical score)= composer
Writer (business) = technical writer
This last category is the farthest from Author in my mind since I perceive a strong disconnect between ownership of the ideas/material and the work produced. In other words, a technical writer goes into a job knowing that he or she does not own raw data or material or the product. This is echoed in the fact that plagiarism is rarely an issue. Old documents are continually adapted from to fix new circumstances without worry about attributing a source.
So I guess the question is for me: Do we stretch the meaning of authorship or do we adopt other terms for specific genres? Personally, I think that I see the death of the author as a term because it is tied too closely to the book and printed text to cover everything. Instead, I'm betting that a new generic term will rise to to cover all of the new multimedia creations that are becoming the norm with the rise of the Internet.
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Yes, I saw your remarks on tech writing, and I detect thorny problems when dealing with authorship and ownership in the corporate world. It might help to follow the logistics in getting a work published. Does authorship apply to the publisher, or perhaps the stage crew? You might want to consider the problems with the e-books pushed by Google (TM), or more specifically, their e-library.
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