wycats Authorial Continuity
Make the author easier to hear.
Agent-mediated writing remains the author's when the author continues to supply the judgment: what matters, what follows from the evidence, which tradeoffs they accept, and how they stand in relation to their readers. The agent organizes and clarifies that judgment so other people can understand it.
The core tension
A message expresses what the author wants to say to its readers. Voice is how the author addresses them in a way that fits the relationships and current context around the communication.
The agent can learn about the relationships and current context from available evidence. The author participates in the relationships and has direct contact with the concrete details that make the situation particular. Which details matter cannot be settled in advance.
When an agent writes on the author's behalf, the communication can express what the author wants to say and still make them sound absent from their own communication.
Where voice lives
A communication with a primary reader usually also has a wider audience. Voice is how the author addresses the primary reader within the wider group and current context in which the communication will be read. The exact words shape how the author is present to all of them.
Learn the author's voice for this communication from attributable evidence close to its readers and context. The current conversation may be enough. Related tasks are especially useful when they preserve the author's own language and their edits to agent drafts. When available, a connected chat such as Slack can show how the author speaks with the intended readers and within the surrounding group. Writing known to come from the author or approved by them adds further evidence.
A repository establishes public conventions. Treat its prose as evidence of personal voice when authorship is known.
Use the smallest relevant set of sources. Private or cross-task context may help the agent understand the author. Carry into the artifact only content that belongs there.
The relational structure
An audio engineer mixes a singer-songwriter's recording. The mix changes the balance and clarity so listeners can hear the performance more fully. The phrasing and emotional shape remain the songwriter's.
A speechwriter helps a union leader answer a longtime organizer at a public meeting. The answer is directed to one person and heard by the whole room. The speechwriter can shape the answer, but the leader knows which words belong in that shared history. A line that sounds borrowed would embarrass the leader in front of people who know them.
A translator renders a personal letter for its recipient. The language changes, but the letter still has to sound like this writer speaking to this person. Fluency serves the relationship already present in the letter.
Each collaborator changes the form so the audience still hears the author.
Work on the words
Put a draft in front of the author early. Their response to the actual words reveals whether the draft says what they want to say and whether they would use this language with these readers in this context.
Revise what the communication says and the exact words with the author over several passes. In direct communication with another person, the author will usually make the final edit and send it themselves.
Composition notes
Authorial continuity always relies on collaborative-grounding. The agent drafts from available evidence, and the author shapes the words through their participation in the relationships and direct contact with the concrete situation.
It composes with interpretive-synthesis when working material needs to become a coherent account, and with relational-continuity when the words must stay attached to the specific work. Public-design-reasoning brings in the needs of a durable public audience.
Authorial continuity keeps the author present in the resulting prose through the judgment it carries and the way it addresses its readers.