Skip to main content
Shakewell

Markup and Content

Topic

A standalone unit of content about a single subject, written to be understood without the surrounding document and reused in many.

Definition

What Topic Means

Topic-based authoring means writing pieces that make sense on their own, rather than chapters that depend on what came before them. It is the precondition for reuse: content that assumes context cannot be moved.

The discipline is editorial rather than technical. Tools can enforce that a topic exists; only a writer can ensure it does not begin with the word 'therefore'.

Get In Touch

Beyond the Definition

Knowing what a term means is the easy half. If you need to know what it obligates on your program, that is the conversation we are built for.