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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/37891
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

What is the difference between "[topic-based authoring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic-based_authoring)" and "modular authoring"?

As I know, there are two well-known authoring approaches:

- Narrative authoring;
- Topic-based authoring (see link above).

Narrative authoring is the most simple concept - just open your text editor and write entire text, from start to end. This is how writers worked for thousands of years.

Topic-based authoring is very modern approach and popular for large technical documentation projects. [DITA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Information_Typing_Architecture), Scrivener, MadCap Flare are all about it. The main goal of topic-based approach is the content reuse.

Now, as I read yesterday, there is another, third approach - modular authoring. It is described here:

[https://www.pdsvision.se/blog/xml-dita-docbook-s1000d-shipdex-confused/](https://www.pdsvision.se/blog/xml-dita-docbook-s1000d-shipdex-confused/)

But what is the actual difference between modular and topic-based approaches? I don't understand it.

Original score: 7